Dear Paul, I would not disagree with a word of what you have written (haven’t yet read every line, but I will). Osama bin Laden also critiqued western bourgeois society pretty accurately, even if his prescription for its cure was a bit off.
But . . .
I read your opening paragraphs and thought “how lovely - humans being human again, playing together, eating and drinking together, unmasked, loving, free” - then it got a bit dark 😂
My point is, I think more of us know, precisely because we’ve been given everything by the machine, what real values are, what really matters - as you and your family do: you are not an outlier, not alone. We are all struggling towards the light - it’s just a race to see if enough of us truly get it, before the light goes out. For me, the jury’s still out on that one.
Well said Paul. Instant gratification is what we are force fed with and I have been sick of it all for most of my adult life. While waiting for my wife to join me in the car the other day I watched a spider emerge from behind my wing mirror to carry out some much needed repairs to her web. Now that made my day pal. Wonderful to watch her complete concentration on the task in hand.
One of the best essays in TAoM series. I've experienced that same, sudden, objective distance from holiday/cultural hedonism and had a slightly different take, though it doesn't contradict your thesis. I even made a sort film about that take several years back:
Thanks for the video, I can identify with it. I feel the same sort of spirit when I stay in beach resorts- a feeling of impermanence, that the place has no value beyond the cash flows it generates.
I live in a beach resort. Not quite that amusement park style, but same idea. I read a story once about how resorts towns are like extremely beautiful women. No one sees them as a whole person with needs and hang-ups. They get idealized as an icon of beauty, desire, pleasure, and never fully human. The place I live suffers from water pollution, habitat loss to constant development, housing crisis, labor shortages, you know it all.... but the hordes of people trapsing through and the wealthy retired ones just see it as a "beauty spot". No one sees the land for what it really is.... degraded and abused. My 13 yr old daughter described this same sentiment to me recently. Her grandma took her to get ice cream and stroll around the shops in a touristy center. She says it makes her sick to her stomach. I think there is some positive in that... seeing my children grow up already unable to 'not see' the real dynamics. At least they are much less fettered than I was at their age.
It probably speaks to your success as a parent. I always get the distinct feeling that despite everything being set up to cater to your "needs" (in reality "wants"), there is no genuine interest in you as distinct person, there is no genuine hospitality in the real sense of the word.
This lifted my spirit this morning, thank you, exactly what I was thinking. 4 years ago I resigned from a comfortable high paying job because I of the stress, I was going to either quit or jump off the roof. Decided to quit thankfully. My wife wasn't to happy about it but she is sticking by me, I can report that I am much healthier, mentally and physically ( lost 50 pounds over that 1st year, am now 180 pounds , ideal weight etc ). I have gotten involved in a Christian ministry and have sworn off buying anything on credit. Its used cars and second hand for me, and my spritual life is the most important thing for me to do, read pray confess etc.. Still have to make some money , I have a job in a small manufacturing plant and some investments but its not crazy. If I wasnt married I would probably just grab a backpack and start walking, walk the earth and get into adventures. In the beginning God created us to not want, to trust in Him, but of course we wanted the one thing He said to not touch.
If we follow the Desert Fathers and see sloth not simply as laziness but as an ever-enveloping apathy to all commitments we've made, I'd say the Machine has all seven sins covered for us.
Thanks Phillip for this comment. I recognize it in myself so often and it always seem to be an insignificant reason that I provide myself for not sticking to a commitment. And the reason usually is because we don’t WANT that thing we committed to enough. We might say or think we want it but when push comes to shove, we’d try to rationalize our apathy. So Paul, you are right, WANT is the acid that drives our Machine world, but it is also the same WANT that drives us to recognize and work to change it. i would suggest that WANT may not be the real acid, I think it could be our PRIDE that we deserve center place, that we deserve to have all our wants met, that it is all about us. Hubris. If we change our position to Humility we might not feel completely entitled to think ‘anything goes’. it ties in with your idea of Limits.
A friendly amendment: it is not that people are not committed enough to a particular want. Rather, it is the fact that humans allow any level of commitment to attach to any particular want in the firs place.
As the Buddha demonstrated, committing/attaching to wants is what causes suffering. Wants/desires are the acid that destroy human beings, and, being want-driven creatures, human beings construct societies that are desire fulfillment mechanisms writ large.
Humility can help. but the humility usually engaged in is the wanting-the-correct-wants kind. Humility must not only de-center the self, but understand and embrace the no-self, so people no longer think in terms of: "That's my song"; "That's my color"; That's my XYZ."
Recently I've been spending more time with a few cats, and I think about John Gray's recent interview statement re: his Philosophy of Cats book:
“Cats live for the sensation of life, not for something they might achieve or not achieve,” he says. “If we attach ourselves too heavily to some overarching purpose we’re losing the joy of life. Leave all those ideologies and religions to one side and what’s left? What’s left is a sensation of life – which is a wonderful thing.”
I forget who said it but I believe the quote went, "I've known many Zen masters in my life, all of them cats."
My honest opinion is that essentially all of us in this culture are cursed to have been rendered completely insane with information, facts, opinions, ideas, perspectives, and millions of bits of consumer culture detritus in the form of adverts and jingles and Saturday morning cartoons etc. We have little to no ability to look at the world with the enviable purity of the average house cat.
My dog was one of the greatest of my many Buddhist teachers.
To regain the enviable purity of a house cat, we do not have to do anything. What needs to occur is that we cease doing things--halting all the bad habits that contaminate our vision and being.
Of course, but easier said than done! The monkey-mind chatters away with all the accumulated baggage noted above and other people, or simply the material demands of life in this culture, are always pulling one back into the fray. My most common experience reading Buddhist texts of one kind or another is of any insights quickly sublimating like rain on hot pavement as this culture, which is hostile and diametrically opposed to that way of seeing/being, shoves one towards doing and away from being.
It all makes one want to flee to a mountain-top to meditate whatever days remain away. And why not? I suspect that question dogs a lot of us here at the Abbey. Why not? Because you'll starve, you fool, comes that little voice. So back into the fray.
Thanks Paul, I'm blessed by the fact that my wife and I do not desire to flaunt, to buy and to display. We have the hardest time explaining to our family members that the kids do not need more toys. If you want to buy them something buy food or clothes. Often that suggestion is ignored and I watch an ever growing pile of toys that are never used pile up in the play room. If they are used I see my two year old grab as many as she can and throw them over her head like Scrooge McDuck would money. A clear sign, we want for nothing and indeed even have more than we could want. Many within our network of friends have said the same thing. There is a divide in the millennial generation that I've noticed between those that desire less and those that think they are supposed to desire more. Within this divide it is always those that desire less that seem to have the happiest, warmest, most inviting homes and so I believe that your conclusion is correct. Live as an example to others, want for nothing and consider every small thing a blessing because it is the small things that really count the most. God Bless!
Truth to tell, upon reading this provocative posting, the now deceased Malcolm Muggeridge and his prophetic voice came tumbling into my mind, ressurected, pell-mell, cutthroat and pistol!
Paul has indeed taken on a similar role, as a prophetic and critical voice during these troubling times, but his voice is uniquely distinct from that of Muggeridge, in that Pauls approach is coloured with the majestic mysteries and wonders of nature and how poorly we humans have stewarded this fragile planet we share together.
Here then is a brilliant sampling of Muggeridge and his penchant for prophetic narrative, bristling with irony, intelligence and wit:
“So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over--a weary, battered old brontosaurus--and became extinct.”
this is excellent! Muggeridge knew of what he spoke since he lived it and turned from it, on his knees, in gratitude. He was a treasure. Thanks so much for quoting him.
I think that is from the book: Seeing through the Eye: Malcolm Muggeridge on Faith
He was by no means a perfect man. His wife may have been the real saint in the family, but he followed the truth where it lead, and he has a prescience that is shocking for its accuracy.
You hit the nail on the head, Mary! Thank you for responding, as well as providing the sampler links.
Indeed, Kitty was the the more saintly figure amongst the two, though in his later days he did walk the talk…and how. His autobiography, The Green Stick, is a good read as well, as are all his essay collections.
Yes, I totally agree. He was extremely courageous. One of the things I really admire about him is that as the truth was revealed to him, he was willing to follow it. He didn't turn away because it was difficult. Instead, he changed his life. Some of his interviews can be found on-line and they are well worth the time also.
That's the big one. The only answer I haver found is to try and find, connect with and ideally live near at least a few people who are trying to do the same. There are many, many people who feel this way, but they are often very isolated from each other. And prepare to be an outcast. If you have these connections though, that's very much easier. Isolation is very hard, and we can often be made to feel like freaks when, I would humbly suggest, we are the sole remaining islands of sanity ;-)
So illuminating, as always, and so beautifully expressed. I think the missing element - if you will, the gasoline put to the fire - was the sudden availability of fossil fuels, which allowed vast fulfillment of wants (at least in the “developed” world), at a labor cost that was de minimus compared to what had prevailed over eons. Marx may have had a hint of this, and Schumacher surely understood it. Spiritual restraint is hard pressed to resist such volcanic pressure, especially among the young, who greatest want is to define themselves in new and different ways, far from their elders and traditions. This is all about to move into reverse, probably brutally so; a silver lining may be humankind’s rediscovery of spirituality.
"Spiritual restraint is hard pressed to resist such volcanic pressure..."
Very well said. I suspect this is why you see so few saints among the super-rich, even though so many have the resources to do saintly things on a grand scale.
Morris Berman writes about this as well, about us living through what he calls, "the waning of the modern ages." He says that it might not be a lot of fun, akin to detoxing from heroin, but at the end of the process we have at least a chance to re-learn how to actually live.
You can at te below link how frantically the primary beneficiaries of the modern ages are to keep the power on indefinitely post-fossil fuels, and to preclude any chance of a new spiritual flowering were consumer culture to end:
I think that "to do saintly things on a grand scale" is a contradiction in terms. Our desire to be "grand" is prideful. Seeking wealth in order to do good things on a larger scale just ends up corrupting the soul with pride until one no longer knows how to do good on a basic, ordinary scale. Jesus' instruction to the rich man who wanted to follow him wasn't to use his wealth to change the country, it was "Go and sell all you have and give the money to the poor...then come and follow me"
I was using 'saints' more in the secular sense of virtuous as opposed to holy, and was thinking of those "such and such billionaire could end world hunger by writing a check" stories. Such a check is of course never written.
Money can be thought of as compressed exploitation. Thus it's not really possible to do good with it, if for no other reason than the damage has already been done. Further, one reason no attempts are ever made is that those who do become that wealthy only do so because they do not think or act in other-focused ways.
As far as what the Christian bible says, I'm a Buddhist and haven't read it.
I think you're mostly right, but I have two points of disagreement.
I don't think it's even possible in theory to enact that kind of grand scale "end world hunger by writing a check" solution. It'll always go wrong somewhere. Who do you write the cheque to? Who implements the solution, who decides a method of distribution? how many people do you need to hire in this grand enterprise before all the money is eaten in the bureaucracy of it all and you become just another international NGO?
Money being compressed exploitation is an interesting thought, but I think it's a bit too simplistic. To get back to basics, one could live in a world where money for fair exchange exists, and is used to transfer real goods made without exploitation to someone else who has use for those goods in a neighbouring town when barter would be impractical.
I've long thought a good metaphor for money is fire. Certainly, fire in small, controlled amounts is useful and beneficial. This is the heyday of laissez-faire capitalism, however, and lighting absolutely everything ablaze is considered right and good. It's very obviously madness.
"Spiritual restraint is hard pressed to resist such volcanic pressure, especially among the young, who greatest want is to define themselves in new and different ways, far from their elders and traditions. This is all about to move into reverse, probably brutally so; a silver lining may be humankind’s rediscovery of spirituality."
I was watching a video earlier this week on the topic of youthful rebellion. In the West we have this trope that its inevitable across place and time. It was the first time I'd heard anyone posit that it may not be a universal phenomenon, but something unique to the decline of the West. It made me try to think of some non-modern non-Western examples and I really struggled. Whilst the desire for identity, glory, recognition, respect etc does seem to be part of a universal journey to adulthood and maturity, the desire to overturn the existing order/authority in a nihilistic way does not seem to be universal at all.
Thanks. I've heard that before, that teenage rebellion is a modern phenomenon. I desperately want it to be true because I have 5 kids, oldest 15 years.
I have thought a few times that people like Greta Thunberg are symptomatic of the problem. Not personally - in many ways she is admirable - but in the cult of youth they represent. Seems to me that a working society has some wise elders available, as well as some sparky, enthusiastic but inexperienced youngsters. Where are ours?
I said tongue in cheek! But I completely agree. One of the distinguishing features of Machine societies is the denigration of accumulated collective wisdom in favour of the new and revolutionary. Any pre-Machine societies that didn't honour the wisdom of the elders about such matters as when to plant seeds or how to deal with a wolf-pack would quickly disappear.
Struck me last weekend that the hailing /celebrating of the young tennis player was out of all proportion, and pushing the agenda, that material success from a very young age is what's to be aspired too. Another thing that struck me was: the British Prime Minister's behaviour in the event of the death of his mother early this week. Boris did not down tools or take time off at this momentous time in his life. He spent the week in parliament, making pronouncement and major decisions, as if nothing had happened in his personal life.
My wife is from an Indian family and she's often said the same thing. Certainly where her parents came from there was no 'teenage rebellion.' I wonder how much of it is linked to the glut of consumer goods that flooded the West after the Great Acceleration. 'Teenagers' as a demographic seem to date from about the same time.
I’ve thought and learned a lot about this as I’ve done youth ministry and am now a parent to a teen and a tween. Other cultures have rites of passage that join young adults to the wider adult community. Our rites of passage (as much as you can call them that) are about shooting young adults out into a detached “youth culture” to navigate on their own. I think often adults reject their teens not the other way around. It’s time to “get back to your own life” once the kids hit teenage years because parents have been taught that raising their kids is an interruption in their “real life.” Plus, teenagers can be hard. So once kids are functional on a pragmatic level, parents can ignore and reject them, but call it a “teenage rebellion” and act like it’s the teens rejecting them. It’s natural for teens to separate from parents in some ways—they’re becoming adults, so they have to learn how to have a new role in a family. But having them separate into a youth culture instead of being handed off to the wider adult community within the culture is what’s different. You can’t learn to be an adult from other children.
The whole adolescent and teenage phase as a particular life-period has been artificially fomented. Filling the minds, hearts and bodies of already highly vulnerable, hormonal, developing young people with pernicious trash (i.e. so-called “youth culture”) is absolutely the most diabolically perfect way of jamming the lines of cultural, spiritual, maturational transmission between elders and the younger generations. It’s been a perfect method of severing the transmission of traditional culture for the very same 60 years in question. The time used to be when teenagers would sincerely seek to emulate their elders, be keen to learn the ropes of the adult world and get out to make their mark. Now, the news-from-nowhere of “youth culture” has turned them in on themselves, trapped in a narcissistic hall of mirrors and prolonged immaturity, preying on their insecurities to keep them emotionally unstable. Perfect candidates for the Machine.
I'm not very hopeful that the solution:" which is putting our own inner house in order", has much chance of happening, if as Paul has stated, we now only care about gratification of the senses. It's a very big leap from one to the other and I can't imagine who the "guides" will be. The ones who are looked up to in the world of the Machine!!!
There's no obligation to pursue that solution or any other. One might simply accept that these are the times we live in and we are people of our time. A lot of it seems to come down to the question of whether or not you can live with yourself if you do so, or if you really struggle with feelings of guilt or hypocrisy or a sense of inauthenticity or of a life wasted when you just give the damned Machine what it wants.
I'm reminded of Boston University film professor Ray Carney's advice to aspiring filmmakers, "you are choosing the hardest possible road... choose it only if you see no other way to save your soul."
Since I read the title of the Schumacher-influenced Club of Rome report as an engineering student in the early 1970s - "The Limits to Growth" - its basic thesis has struck me as unarguable. It has always seemed to me that the tactic is to dismantle the opposing arguments, such as 'it's too far off to worry about', 'my little contribution doesn't matter' or 'our grandchildren can solve the problems'. I'm always wary of arguments which promote 'Saving my own soul/integrity' - they always strike me as too self-interested. And I say that as a christian preacher.
Someone mentioned earlier that want can work both ways. What happens when a person wants -- more than life itself -- to be in right relationship to all that is? It can be a very powerful want. It will not be instantly gratified but it can start a journey. One can become utterly disgusted with any cheap alternatives to the deep satisfaction of that want.
Absolutely. However, is that just on the individual level? We need something that will work on a societal scale. And the only models the Machine’s media have for that are the Taliban, Soviet Venezuela, and the Jim Jones cult with the Kool-Aid.
I have no clue how to fix anything on a societal scale. I am lucky if I get my own problems under control. I do trust God, though, and am content. If the longing for God (Wholeness, Rightness, Peace, Love Himself) is an acid that corrodes the machine, then let us exude that acid in the sphere that has been given us... I certainly believe Paul Kingsnorth's corrosive attitude toward the machine has spilled on me a bit.
I think this is the wrong way to look at it. I spent far too many years trying to 'dismantle arguments' before I realised that arguments were just rationalisations. None of us is going to change or save the whole of society - and that way of thinking breeds tyranny if we're not careful. I think we need patience - and, if we're religious people - to trust in God. What else is there? We are not in control anyway of anything but (occasionally) ourselves.
I admit that so many arguments are just self-serving rationalisations. If their proponents are wholly wedded to the Machine then you are quite correct. My problem is that to allow them to go unchallenged is to allow them to spawn, and to increase their traction among people who simply consume other people's ideas. But then I still hold to the notion of truth, and a duty to combat untruth - and I don't consider that a concern for truth and truth-speaking is a prerogative of either the religious or the non-religious people. (Or the opposite, but that's a whole new can of worms).
The Buddhist teachings might provide a useful distinction here for the difference between material grasping (called “lobha” by the Buddha, and deemed entirely unskilful) and the wholesomeness of the desire for spiritual progress and liberation (called “chanda”). Chanda was encouraged, lobha obviously not.
This reminds me of Stringer's argument in his book "Unwanted". Addiction are often contractions of desire and can, in part, attended to, he says, by cultivating the senses
I think that, as Schumacher says, the guides can be found, at least sometimes, in the old traditions. They are hard to find in the West now. Certainly 'putting our own inner house in order' will not 'save the world.' But I think enough people have always stood outside the sensory whirl and felt distanced from it to make little bubbles of otherness viable.
I think it is worth asking, is the point of our existence to "save the world?" I don't think it is and attempts to "save the world" might be just the thing that gets us in trouble. The world is just too big and I am just too small, but I have many people right beside me and I love them and maybe can help them. I have a small place where I live and maybe I can make it better by being good, by being what God wants me to be (which, of course, is not an easy question to answer!)
When we come to the point where the 'dismantling of arguments' seems futile or where that task seems overwhelming then, as we look around for some hopeful way forward, I suggest that in Goethe's science we might find, in a radical conceptual foundation for the forging of new relationships to the world, one old tradition that belongs to our western mode of thought that can be a source of hope.
"What is the brake" (phrased differently) has obsessed me since I first encountered the Club of Rome report 'The Limits of Growth' in late 1972. I have been a Christian preacher almost exactly since then, and what difference has it made? Yet this essay reminded me of "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Last Sunday, I took the text two verses before that - "Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me"", which at least puts Want in its place. But how to gain traction, other than with the decreasing band of believers? With a government (most governments) dedicated to keeping power, even now, by promising the kiddies that they can both have sustainability and the keys to an ever-expanding sweet-shop of instant gratifications? Who is listening, and how to gain traction?
The driver of change on that scale is always force. This culture will stop those destructive behaviors only when compelled to stop. In this case that force may take the form of peak oil, climate heating hitting some runaway threshold that changes the game, really any sort of severe decline in living standards prompted by whatever prompts it.
Morris Berman has said that once the "bright lights of the modern age begin winking out", people will not only read by candlelight, but will claim that they always really wanted to do so. The new normal of relatively constrained circumstances will be embraced and touted as "better", as a kind of Zen road to happiness. People make virtues of necessity.
Paul is right that no matter how many swell-seeming ideas we come up with for changing this culture through the power of our ideas, arguments, example, organizational skills, or what have you, it is simply not going to happen. We are simply passengers aboard this ship, and the name on the hull reads RMS Titanic.
He's been writing for such a long time now and some of it is fairly dated. His most famous book remains 'The Reenchantment of the World', but I liked 'Coming to Our Senses' better. The 'Why America Failed' trilogy is of interest primarily to disaffected Americans, and again is slightly dated now. His newer ones like 'Genio' and 'Neurotic Beauty' are excellent but my favorite of all is 'Spinning Straw Into Gold', a slender work he claimed to have written over the course a few days.
In fact that's probably an ideal place to start to figure out if Berman is someone you'd like to read more of.
Thanks Paul, well said. Did you know the Financial Times agrees? We have not a mind, or a soul, but "treat brain" -- though they'd argue not such a bad thing. (Of course the neuroscience is pure ideology.) https://on.ft.com/3nBdK6F
Paul, thank you for this. It's a fantastically thoughtful piece.
One of the barriers that I find myself hitting up against in both your work and the global discussion going on these days about climate change, materialism, and let's say, civilizational overload. I come face to face with the question, what can be done? I used to describe myself as a climate skeptic, that maybe, just maybe the scientists and the scholars had something wrong, that surely nothing could be so catastrophic. But we've just put all the problems of material growth onto other people who are less fortunate than the West in some economic manner. I think that skepticism came more from a sense of fear because the problem seems so insurmountable.
I agree with the wisdom tradition of ordering oneself and only then can you begin to branch out into ordering anything else around you, but my question would be, what kind of order? Because it appears to me that the way I've been taught success since high school and college, get a well-paying job, buy a house, build a family, all circles around a distinct form of materialism as well and for as much as I may imagine the benefits of monasticism, I know I'm personally not cut out for that level of asceticism.
I definitely like the idea of living with less. I'd be curious on your thoughts whether you think though that the Minimalist movement and the seemingly pop-up following of Marie Kondo is something brought about by the Machine or a reaction to it? Naturally I imagine there is a Christian sense of minimalism, a reduction in possession without any thought of aesthetic style.
That question of how to order yourself and which limits to live within is a personal one, there is no universal guide for what you are called to do and how you are called to live within a messed up world other than "be a saint". That doesn't necessarily mean monasticism persay. My only advice in finding that path is to pray, lots. Go somewhere silent if you find it hard, you can always go and visit a monastery even if you have no intention of going that route yourself. I just came back from a weekend staying at a Benedictine monastery and found that the silence cleared away so much junk getting in the way of God, and you will find wise people at those quiet places.
The question is why did the pursuit/gratification of pleasure become an organizing principle of culture. Instant gratification is merely the latest iteration of a centuries-old, societal-wide behavior.
Human beings started valorizing the gratification of their senses when they developed the concept of the permanent self. Any quiet, serious consideration of existence leads a person to the realization that the world is marked by impermanence. But for many (most?) people, this truth is unbearable. A permanent self with definite contours is much preferable. But how to avoid/hide from the reality of impermanence, which even modest contemplation reveals?
Simple. Make desire fulfillment central to people's lives. Human beings are desire generators par excellence. Hundreds of desires emerge in a person's life every minute. Looked at properly, all of these desires are as empty as the rest of existence, but through the simple, yet toxic, act of attaching to them, a false sense of self-permanence can be generated, and more importantly, maintained.
Having thus valorized desires, humans needed a way of distinguishing between the ones to fulfill and the ones to abstain from. Abrahamic religions came up with the categories of "Thou Shall" and "Thou Shall Not," with the result that Western culture can be read as one long, tedious history of desires being moved from one category to the other--sometimes transferred back--and sometimes inhabiting both categories at the same time.
Yet there remained the uncomfortable/discomforting reality of impermanence--a truth that advances in science made more and more apparent. Matter was solid until it wasn't, and now whether something is a wave or a particle can depend on the observer. As scientific evidence of impermanence accumulated, desire satisfaction had to accelerate to keep the truth at bay.
You suddenly seeing things for what they were brought this to mind:
"Within all phenomena,
causes and conditions are empty—
they are devoid of essence.
When you cease your [deluded] mindset
and penetrate the ultimate foundation,
such a person is called a 'true monk.'”
--The Sutra on the Auspicious Appearances and Origins of the Prince Siddhartha
Want is not the acid. Attaching to want is the acid. The belief that some wants are inherently good and others inherently bad is the acid. All wants are empty (in the Buddhist sense, not in the sense of void or nothingness). Humans will never stop generating wants, but to valorize the satisfaction of these wants in a world marked by impermanence is a fool's game.
The brake? Unattachment mixed with a dash of dependent origination and a soupcon of emptiness--all naturally occurring limits (which are the best and most effective kind). Modernity destroys limits because like other manifestations of Western culture, it valorizes desire satisfaction, declaring that wants have inherent nature (and, logically, so too must the generators of such wants).
"All phenomena are devoid of fixed nature,
But in our thoughts, they appear to be [permanently] existent.
All true. This leaves unanswered the question, however, of how in pragmatic terms not to be drawn into participating in this culture's delusions. What I have found, is that participation is not optional. This culture sends out the equivalent of truant officers to haul you in if you dare stop playing the game.
The Machine cedes no ground to go to, no time to find one's way out of delusion. The question is always this: where's the money? Do you have the money? We need the money, now. That's not enough. Need more money. More money, now. Where is the money? Don't talk to us about Buddhism, where is the money? WHERE IS THE MONEY?
Thanks both. Good to see some Buddhist input on here!
You are right about attachment and impermanence, Brian, I think. Interestingly, the Buddhist teaching on the matter is not so far, in some respects anyway, from the understanding of the fathers of the Eastern Church. Hesychasm can look a lot like Zen from a certain light, and 'consider the lilies of the field' is a teaching about detachment from want par excellence.
However, it's also the case, isn't it, that Buddhism comes with a long (very long, in case of monks) list of thou shalts and thou shalt nots. It's impossible to avoid that in any serious path. I'm not sure that's the issue. But I agree that detachment - or dying to the world, as the orthodox would have it - is the way through. The problem of course is that it is terrifically hard, and very few will ever achieve it.
Personally, I make a distinction between Buddhism as philosophy and Buddhism as religion. As philosophy it seems to me painfully, unavoidably true. I recall a scholar one time warning students away from Buddhism because, "it's just so sad." There is an excellent book by Steve Hagen called 'Buddhism Plain and Simple' that strips absolutely everything away except the core awareness (he keeps emphasizing, "just see... just see...") and I got more from that book than from reading anything Shantideva or Thich Nhat Hanh ever wrote.
As a religion it's of little interest to me. I recall Alan Watts speaking about Buddhist monks selling beads and prayer flags to tourists while at the same time knowing all of this stuff was silly fluff that had nothing to do with actual Buddhism. Also, your phrase "serious path" I think perhaps belies an intellectual's search for a truly satisfying spiritual and intellectual meal. Buddhism is (or can be) radically minimal and spare and simple, and when I look at my happy zen cats, I suspect anything complicated at all to be leading away from their innate embodied wisdom. This in some sense is my issue with Christianity. It involves people talking about stuff, which is a red flag. lol
Saw an interesting quote this morning, attributed to philosopher Marshall Roderick's son Rick: "Mass culture is enlightenment in reverse. The goal is precisely to wipe out that last little garrison of human autonomy."
I would argue that its a very Western and self-indulgent notion to believe that you can essentially take the bits you like of a religion and strip out everything you don't like - this is essentially what you are doing by subjectively separating Buddhist "philosophy" from Buddhist "religion". It's a perennialist approach which puts you above any particular religion, which turns out to be precisely the place to be if you don't want to be challenged or can't commit to something. I've always found that when I don't understand something or find it difficult to digest, its worth struggling with that. Often out of the struggle you realise its perhaps you that needs to change your mindset/conclusion. I'm not saying this to defend Buddhism, I don't have much knowledge of it. It's just the approach of pick and mix when it comes to religion that I don't have much time for.
I'm not "picking and mixing" religions. I have no interest in or use for *any* religion. Buddhism is often considered a philosophy, in fact it's difficult at times not to see it as a philosophy, and I find it a highly useful and instructive one. Sorry if this offends anyone, though I really can't understand why it would!
You didn't offend me at all, though it seems the opposite may be true. I was just offering my thoughts, not trying to run you down or win a debate. I will bow out on the topic!
I have often thought that if I were not a Buddhist, and I might instead be a an Orthodox Christian who committed the heresy of universalism (among other deviations). I find The Sayings of the Desert Fathers very Buddhist in some ways.
As for thou shalls and thou shall nots, the Vinaya is extensive, but for Buddhist practitioners it consists of eight parts, i.e., the Noble Eightfold Path/Fourth Noble Truth:
Right Speech
Right Action
Right Livelihood
Right Effort
Right Mindfulness
Right Concentration
Right Resolve
Right View
As for unattachment (which I think is a better term than "detachment" with its connotation of indifference, which is not a characteristic of unattachment), it is not as difficult as people say/think. Look at the amazing discipline achieved by athletes, artists, and others. Didn't someone write that the Desert Fathers could be considered athletes for God?
Discipline is a good work. Spiritual vigilance, moment by moment. Every tradition teaches the need for it, presumably because it is so incredibly hard! But at this stage in my life I can't see anything else that makes much sense.
Paul, have you ever read Michael Hanby's essay in Communio called "The Culture of Death, The Ontology of Boredom, and the Resistance of Joy"? It's definitely worth reading. I'll post it below.
Love this. I’ve just read this by Robert Desnos, which seems apt:
And we must do our loving,
Find fields and trees once more,
Find spring and fun of living,
Forget the savage war.
(From ‘In Helmet’)
Dear Paul, I would not disagree with a word of what you have written (haven’t yet read every line, but I will). Osama bin Laden also critiqued western bourgeois society pretty accurately, even if his prescription for its cure was a bit off.
But . . .
I read your opening paragraphs and thought “how lovely - humans being human again, playing together, eating and drinking together, unmasked, loving, free” - then it got a bit dark 😂
My point is, I think more of us know, precisely because we’ve been given everything by the machine, what real values are, what really matters - as you and your family do: you are not an outlier, not alone. We are all struggling towards the light - it’s just a race to see if enough of us truly get it, before the light goes out. For me, the jury’s still out on that one.
So pray, and fingers crossed
David
Well said Paul. Instant gratification is what we are force fed with and I have been sick of it all for most of my adult life. While waiting for my wife to join me in the car the other day I watched a spider emerge from behind my wing mirror to carry out some much needed repairs to her web. Now that made my day pal. Wonderful to watch her complete concentration on the task in hand.
One of the best essays in TAoM series. I've experienced that same, sudden, objective distance from holiday/cultural hedonism and had a slightly different take, though it doesn't contradict your thesis. I even made a sort film about that take several years back:
https://vimeo.com/214691253
Thanks for the video, I can identify with it. I feel the same sort of spirit when I stay in beach resorts- a feeling of impermanence, that the place has no value beyond the cash flows it generates.
I live in a beach resort. Not quite that amusement park style, but same idea. I read a story once about how resorts towns are like extremely beautiful women. No one sees them as a whole person with needs and hang-ups. They get idealized as an icon of beauty, desire, pleasure, and never fully human. The place I live suffers from water pollution, habitat loss to constant development, housing crisis, labor shortages, you know it all.... but the hordes of people trapsing through and the wealthy retired ones just see it as a "beauty spot". No one sees the land for what it really is.... degraded and abused. My 13 yr old daughter described this same sentiment to me recently. Her grandma took her to get ice cream and stroll around the shops in a touristy center. She says it makes her sick to her stomach. I think there is some positive in that... seeing my children grow up already unable to 'not see' the real dynamics. At least they are much less fettered than I was at their age.
It probably speaks to your success as a parent. I always get the distinct feeling that despite everything being set up to cater to your "needs" (in reality "wants"), there is no genuine interest in you as distinct person, there is no genuine hospitality in the real sense of the word.
This lifted my spirit this morning, thank you, exactly what I was thinking. 4 years ago I resigned from a comfortable high paying job because I of the stress, I was going to either quit or jump off the roof. Decided to quit thankfully. My wife wasn't to happy about it but she is sticking by me, I can report that I am much healthier, mentally and physically ( lost 50 pounds over that 1st year, am now 180 pounds , ideal weight etc ). I have gotten involved in a Christian ministry and have sworn off buying anything on credit. Its used cars and second hand for me, and my spritual life is the most important thing for me to do, read pray confess etc.. Still have to make some money , I have a job in a small manufacturing plant and some investments but its not crazy. If I wasnt married I would probably just grab a backpack and start walking, walk the earth and get into adventures. In the beginning God created us to not want, to trust in Him, but of course we wanted the one thing He said to not touch.
If we follow the Desert Fathers and see sloth not simply as laziness but as an ever-enveloping apathy to all commitments we've made, I'd say the Machine has all seven sins covered for us.
Thanks Phillip for this comment. I recognize it in myself so often and it always seem to be an insignificant reason that I provide myself for not sticking to a commitment. And the reason usually is because we don’t WANT that thing we committed to enough. We might say or think we want it but when push comes to shove, we’d try to rationalize our apathy. So Paul, you are right, WANT is the acid that drives our Machine world, but it is also the same WANT that drives us to recognize and work to change it. i would suggest that WANT may not be the real acid, I think it could be our PRIDE that we deserve center place, that we deserve to have all our wants met, that it is all about us. Hubris. If we change our position to Humility we might not feel completely entitled to think ‘anything goes’. it ties in with your idea of Limits.
A friendly amendment: it is not that people are not committed enough to a particular want. Rather, it is the fact that humans allow any level of commitment to attach to any particular want in the firs place.
As the Buddha demonstrated, committing/attaching to wants is what causes suffering. Wants/desires are the acid that destroy human beings, and, being want-driven creatures, human beings construct societies that are desire fulfillment mechanisms writ large.
Humility can help. but the humility usually engaged in is the wanting-the-correct-wants kind. Humility must not only de-center the self, but understand and embrace the no-self, so people no longer think in terms of: "That's my song"; "That's my color"; That's my XYZ."
Recently I've been spending more time with a few cats, and I think about John Gray's recent interview statement re: his Philosophy of Cats book:
“Cats live for the sensation of life, not for something they might achieve or not achieve,” he says. “If we attach ourselves too heavily to some overarching purpose we’re losing the joy of life. Leave all those ideologies and religions to one side and what’s left? What’s left is a sensation of life – which is a wonderful thing.”
I forget who said it but I believe the quote went, "I've known many Zen masters in my life, all of them cats."
My honest opinion is that essentially all of us in this culture are cursed to have been rendered completely insane with information, facts, opinions, ideas, perspectives, and millions of bits of consumer culture detritus in the form of adverts and jingles and Saturday morning cartoons etc. We have little to no ability to look at the world with the enviable purity of the average house cat.
It is a pathetic state of affairs.
My dog was one of the greatest of my many Buddhist teachers.
To regain the enviable purity of a house cat, we do not have to do anything. What needs to occur is that we cease doing things--halting all the bad habits that contaminate our vision and being.
Of course, but easier said than done! The monkey-mind chatters away with all the accumulated baggage noted above and other people, or simply the material demands of life in this culture, are always pulling one back into the fray. My most common experience reading Buddhist texts of one kind or another is of any insights quickly sublimating like rain on hot pavement as this culture, which is hostile and diametrically opposed to that way of seeing/being, shoves one towards doing and away from being.
It all makes one want to flee to a mountain-top to meditate whatever days remain away. And why not? I suspect that question dogs a lot of us here at the Abbey. Why not? Because you'll starve, you fool, comes that little voice. So back into the fray.
Thanks Paul, I'm blessed by the fact that my wife and I do not desire to flaunt, to buy and to display. We have the hardest time explaining to our family members that the kids do not need more toys. If you want to buy them something buy food or clothes. Often that suggestion is ignored and I watch an ever growing pile of toys that are never used pile up in the play room. If they are used I see my two year old grab as many as she can and throw them over her head like Scrooge McDuck would money. A clear sign, we want for nothing and indeed even have more than we could want. Many within our network of friends have said the same thing. There is a divide in the millennial generation that I've noticed between those that desire less and those that think they are supposed to desire more. Within this divide it is always those that desire less that seem to have the happiest, warmest, most inviting homes and so I believe that your conclusion is correct. Live as an example to others, want for nothing and consider every small thing a blessing because it is the small things that really count the most. God Bless!
Truth to tell, upon reading this provocative posting, the now deceased Malcolm Muggeridge and his prophetic voice came tumbling into my mind, ressurected, pell-mell, cutthroat and pistol!
Paul has indeed taken on a similar role, as a prophetic and critical voice during these troubling times, but his voice is uniquely distinct from that of Muggeridge, in that Pauls approach is coloured with the majestic mysteries and wonders of nature and how poorly we humans have stewarded this fragile planet we share together.
Here then is a brilliant sampling of Muggeridge and his penchant for prophetic narrative, bristling with irony, intelligence and wit:
“So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over--a weary, battered old brontosaurus--and became extinct.”
this is excellent! Muggeridge knew of what he spoke since he lived it and turned from it, on his knees, in gratitude. He was a treasure. Thanks so much for quoting him.
Brilliant. I have never read Muggeridge. Sounds like it is time to remedy that. What's the source for this quote?
I think that is from the book: Seeing through the Eye: Malcolm Muggeridge on Faith
He was by no means a perfect man. His wife may have been the real saint in the family, but he followed the truth where it lead, and he has a prescience that is shocking for its accuracy.
here's a sampler:
https://yorkvilleinstitute.wordpress.com/2008/12/10/the-humane-holocaust/
http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2005/mmuggeridge_christian_dec05.asp
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/The-Great-Liberal-Death-Wish-May-1979.pdf
You hit the nail on the head, Mary! Thank you for responding, as well as providing the sampler links.
Indeed, Kitty was the the more saintly figure amongst the two, though in his later days he did walk the talk…and how. His autobiography, The Green Stick, is a good read as well, as are all his essay collections.
Yes, I totally agree. He was extremely courageous. One of the things I really admire about him is that as the truth was revealed to him, he was willing to follow it. He didn't turn away because it was difficult. Instead, he changed his life. Some of his interviews can be found on-line and they are well worth the time also.
Thanks again for bringing him up!
I agree with your diagnosis and would love more help with what to do and how to do it.
That's the big one. The only answer I haver found is to try and find, connect with and ideally live near at least a few people who are trying to do the same. There are many, many people who feel this way, but they are often very isolated from each other. And prepare to be an outcast. If you have these connections though, that's very much easier. Isolation is very hard, and we can often be made to feel like freaks when, I would humbly suggest, we are the sole remaining islands of sanity ;-)
So illuminating, as always, and so beautifully expressed. I think the missing element - if you will, the gasoline put to the fire - was the sudden availability of fossil fuels, which allowed vast fulfillment of wants (at least in the “developed” world), at a labor cost that was de minimus compared to what had prevailed over eons. Marx may have had a hint of this, and Schumacher surely understood it. Spiritual restraint is hard pressed to resist such volcanic pressure, especially among the young, who greatest want is to define themselves in new and different ways, far from their elders and traditions. This is all about to move into reverse, probably brutally so; a silver lining may be humankind’s rediscovery of spirituality.
"Spiritual restraint is hard pressed to resist such volcanic pressure..."
Very well said. I suspect this is why you see so few saints among the super-rich, even though so many have the resources to do saintly things on a grand scale.
Morris Berman writes about this as well, about us living through what he calls, "the waning of the modern ages." He says that it might not be a lot of fun, akin to detoxing from heroin, but at the end of the process we have at least a chance to re-learn how to actually live.
You can at te below link how frantically the primary beneficiaries of the modern ages are to keep the power on indefinitely post-fossil fuels, and to preclude any chance of a new spiritual flowering were consumer culture to end:
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/08/fusion-gets-closer-with-successful-test-of-new-kind-of-magnet.html
I think that "to do saintly things on a grand scale" is a contradiction in terms. Our desire to be "grand" is prideful. Seeking wealth in order to do good things on a larger scale just ends up corrupting the soul with pride until one no longer knows how to do good on a basic, ordinary scale. Jesus' instruction to the rich man who wanted to follow him wasn't to use his wealth to change the country, it was "Go and sell all you have and give the money to the poor...then come and follow me"
I was using 'saints' more in the secular sense of virtuous as opposed to holy, and was thinking of those "such and such billionaire could end world hunger by writing a check" stories. Such a check is of course never written.
Money can be thought of as compressed exploitation. Thus it's not really possible to do good with it, if for no other reason than the damage has already been done. Further, one reason no attempts are ever made is that those who do become that wealthy only do so because they do not think or act in other-focused ways.
As far as what the Christian bible says, I'm a Buddhist and haven't read it.
I think you're mostly right, but I have two points of disagreement.
I don't think it's even possible in theory to enact that kind of grand scale "end world hunger by writing a check" solution. It'll always go wrong somewhere. Who do you write the cheque to? Who implements the solution, who decides a method of distribution? how many people do you need to hire in this grand enterprise before all the money is eaten in the bureaucracy of it all and you become just another international NGO?
Money being compressed exploitation is an interesting thought, but I think it's a bit too simplistic. To get back to basics, one could live in a world where money for fair exchange exists, and is used to transfer real goods made without exploitation to someone else who has use for those goods in a neighbouring town when barter would be impractical.
I've long thought a good metaphor for money is fire. Certainly, fire in small, controlled amounts is useful and beneficial. This is the heyday of laissez-faire capitalism, however, and lighting absolutely everything ablaze is considered right and good. It's very obviously madness.
"Spiritual restraint is hard pressed to resist such volcanic pressure, especially among the young, who greatest want is to define themselves in new and different ways, far from their elders and traditions. This is all about to move into reverse, probably brutally so; a silver lining may be humankind’s rediscovery of spirituality."
I was watching a video earlier this week on the topic of youthful rebellion. In the West we have this trope that its inevitable across place and time. It was the first time I'd heard anyone posit that it may not be a universal phenomenon, but something unique to the decline of the West. It made me try to think of some non-modern non-Western examples and I really struggled. Whilst the desire for identity, glory, recognition, respect etc does seem to be part of a universal journey to adulthood and maturity, the desire to overturn the existing order/authority in a nihilistic way does not seem to be universal at all.
The video was this one, if anyone is interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txkipz6SNQA
Thanks. I've heard that before, that teenage rebellion is a modern phenomenon. I desperately want it to be true because I have 5 kids, oldest 15 years.
(tongue in cheek) use that rebellion. Suggest that Greta Thunberg needs a successor or five.
I have thought a few times that people like Greta Thunberg are symptomatic of the problem. Not personally - in many ways she is admirable - but in the cult of youth they represent. Seems to me that a working society has some wise elders available, as well as some sparky, enthusiastic but inexperienced youngsters. Where are ours?
I said tongue in cheek! But I completely agree. One of the distinguishing features of Machine societies is the denigration of accumulated collective wisdom in favour of the new and revolutionary. Any pre-Machine societies that didn't honour the wisdom of the elders about such matters as when to plant seeds or how to deal with a wolf-pack would quickly disappear.
Struck me last weekend that the hailing /celebrating of the young tennis player was out of all proportion, and pushing the agenda, that material success from a very young age is what's to be aspired too. Another thing that struck me was: the British Prime Minister's behaviour in the event of the death of his mother early this week. Boris did not down tools or take time off at this momentous time in his life. He spent the week in parliament, making pronouncement and major decisions, as if nothing had happened in his personal life.
My wife is from an Indian family and she's often said the same thing. Certainly where her parents came from there was no 'teenage rebellion.' I wonder how much of it is linked to the glut of consumer goods that flooded the West after the Great Acceleration. 'Teenagers' as a demographic seem to date from about the same time.
I’ve thought and learned a lot about this as I’ve done youth ministry and am now a parent to a teen and a tween. Other cultures have rites of passage that join young adults to the wider adult community. Our rites of passage (as much as you can call them that) are about shooting young adults out into a detached “youth culture” to navigate on their own. I think often adults reject their teens not the other way around. It’s time to “get back to your own life” once the kids hit teenage years because parents have been taught that raising their kids is an interruption in their “real life.” Plus, teenagers can be hard. So once kids are functional on a pragmatic level, parents can ignore and reject them, but call it a “teenage rebellion” and act like it’s the teens rejecting them. It’s natural for teens to separate from parents in some ways—they’re becoming adults, so they have to learn how to have a new role in a family. But having them separate into a youth culture instead of being handed off to the wider adult community within the culture is what’s different. You can’t learn to be an adult from other children.
The whole adolescent and teenage phase as a particular life-period has been artificially fomented. Filling the minds, hearts and bodies of already highly vulnerable, hormonal, developing young people with pernicious trash (i.e. so-called “youth culture”) is absolutely the most diabolically perfect way of jamming the lines of cultural, spiritual, maturational transmission between elders and the younger generations. It’s been a perfect method of severing the transmission of traditional culture for the very same 60 years in question. The time used to be when teenagers would sincerely seek to emulate their elders, be keen to learn the ropes of the adult world and get out to make their mark. Now, the news-from-nowhere of “youth culture” has turned them in on themselves, trapped in a narcissistic hall of mirrors and prolonged immaturity, preying on their insecurities to keep them emotionally unstable. Perfect candidates for the Machine.
I'm not very hopeful that the solution:" which is putting our own inner house in order", has much chance of happening, if as Paul has stated, we now only care about gratification of the senses. It's a very big leap from one to the other and I can't imagine who the "guides" will be. The ones who are looked up to in the world of the Machine!!!
There's no obligation to pursue that solution or any other. One might simply accept that these are the times we live in and we are people of our time. A lot of it seems to come down to the question of whether or not you can live with yourself if you do so, or if you really struggle with feelings of guilt or hypocrisy or a sense of inauthenticity or of a life wasted when you just give the damned Machine what it wants.
I'm reminded of Boston University film professor Ray Carney's advice to aspiring filmmakers, "you are choosing the hardest possible road... choose it only if you see no other way to save your soul."
Since I read the title of the Schumacher-influenced Club of Rome report as an engineering student in the early 1970s - "The Limits to Growth" - its basic thesis has struck me as unarguable. It has always seemed to me that the tactic is to dismantle the opposing arguments, such as 'it's too far off to worry about', 'my little contribution doesn't matter' or 'our grandchildren can solve the problems'. I'm always wary of arguments which promote 'Saving my own soul/integrity' - they always strike me as too self-interested. And I say that as a christian preacher.
Someone mentioned earlier that want can work both ways. What happens when a person wants -- more than life itself -- to be in right relationship to all that is? It can be a very powerful want. It will not be instantly gratified but it can start a journey. One can become utterly disgusted with any cheap alternatives to the deep satisfaction of that want.
Absolutely. However, is that just on the individual level? We need something that will work on a societal scale. And the only models the Machine’s media have for that are the Taliban, Soviet Venezuela, and the Jim Jones cult with the Kool-Aid.
I have no clue how to fix anything on a societal scale. I am lucky if I get my own problems under control. I do trust God, though, and am content. If the longing for God (Wholeness, Rightness, Peace, Love Himself) is an acid that corrodes the machine, then let us exude that acid in the sphere that has been given us... I certainly believe Paul Kingsnorth's corrosive attitude toward the machine has spilled on me a bit.
Oh dear. Sorry.
I think this is the wrong way to look at it. I spent far too many years trying to 'dismantle arguments' before I realised that arguments were just rationalisations. None of us is going to change or save the whole of society - and that way of thinking breeds tyranny if we're not careful. I think we need patience - and, if we're religious people - to trust in God. What else is there? We are not in control anyway of anything but (occasionally) ourselves.
I admit that so many arguments are just self-serving rationalisations. If their proponents are wholly wedded to the Machine then you are quite correct. My problem is that to allow them to go unchallenged is to allow them to spawn, and to increase their traction among people who simply consume other people's ideas. But then I still hold to the notion of truth, and a duty to combat untruth - and I don't consider that a concern for truth and truth-speaking is a prerogative of either the religious or the non-religious people. (Or the opposite, but that's a whole new can of worms).
The Buddhist teachings might provide a useful distinction here for the difference between material grasping (called “lobha” by the Buddha, and deemed entirely unskilful) and the wholesomeness of the desire for spiritual progress and liberation (called “chanda”). Chanda was encouraged, lobha obviously not.
This reminds me of Stringer's argument in his book "Unwanted". Addiction are often contractions of desire and can, in part, attended to, he says, by cultivating the senses
I think that, as Schumacher says, the guides can be found, at least sometimes, in the old traditions. They are hard to find in the West now. Certainly 'putting our own inner house in order' will not 'save the world.' But I think enough people have always stood outside the sensory whirl and felt distanced from it to make little bubbles of otherness viable.
I think it is worth asking, is the point of our existence to "save the world?" I don't think it is and attempts to "save the world" might be just the thing that gets us in trouble. The world is just too big and I am just too small, but I have many people right beside me and I love them and maybe can help them. I have a small place where I live and maybe I can make it better by being good, by being what God wants me to be (which, of course, is not an easy question to answer!)
When we come to the point where the 'dismantling of arguments' seems futile or where that task seems overwhelming then, as we look around for some hopeful way forward, I suggest that in Goethe's science we might find, in a radical conceptual foundation for the forging of new relationships to the world, one old tradition that belongs to our western mode of thought that can be a source of hope.
"What is the brake" (phrased differently) has obsessed me since I first encountered the Club of Rome report 'The Limits of Growth' in late 1972. I have been a Christian preacher almost exactly since then, and what difference has it made? Yet this essay reminded me of "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Last Sunday, I took the text two verses before that - "Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me"", which at least puts Want in its place. But how to gain traction, other than with the decreasing band of believers? With a government (most governments) dedicated to keeping power, even now, by promising the kiddies that they can both have sustainability and the keys to an ever-expanding sweet-shop of instant gratifications? Who is listening, and how to gain traction?
The driver of change on that scale is always force. This culture will stop those destructive behaviors only when compelled to stop. In this case that force may take the form of peak oil, climate heating hitting some runaway threshold that changes the game, really any sort of severe decline in living standards prompted by whatever prompts it.
Morris Berman has said that once the "bright lights of the modern age begin winking out", people will not only read by candlelight, but will claim that they always really wanted to do so. The new normal of relatively constrained circumstances will be embraced and touted as "better", as a kind of Zen road to happiness. People make virtues of necessity.
Paul is right that no matter how many swell-seeming ideas we come up with for changing this culture through the power of our ideas, arguments, example, organizational skills, or what have you, it is simply not going to happen. We are simply passengers aboard this ship, and the name on the hull reads RMS Titanic.
which book of Morris Berman's would you suggest for a first?
He's been writing for such a long time now and some of it is fairly dated. His most famous book remains 'The Reenchantment of the World', but I liked 'Coming to Our Senses' better. The 'Why America Failed' trilogy is of interest primarily to disaffected Americans, and again is slightly dated now. His newer ones like 'Genio' and 'Neurotic Beauty' are excellent but my favorite of all is 'Spinning Straw Into Gold', a slender work he claimed to have written over the course a few days.
In fact that's probably an ideal place to start to figure out if Berman is someone you'd like to read more of.
Thanks Paul, well said. Did you know the Financial Times agrees? We have not a mind, or a soul, but "treat brain" -- though they'd argue not such a bad thing. (Of course the neuroscience is pure ideology.) https://on.ft.com/3nBdK6F
Reading that article made me want pizza, chocolate, and a decent bottle of wine. Now.
'Treat brain' is clearly contagious...
Paul, thank you for this. It's a fantastically thoughtful piece.
One of the barriers that I find myself hitting up against in both your work and the global discussion going on these days about climate change, materialism, and let's say, civilizational overload. I come face to face with the question, what can be done? I used to describe myself as a climate skeptic, that maybe, just maybe the scientists and the scholars had something wrong, that surely nothing could be so catastrophic. But we've just put all the problems of material growth onto other people who are less fortunate than the West in some economic manner. I think that skepticism came more from a sense of fear because the problem seems so insurmountable.
I agree with the wisdom tradition of ordering oneself and only then can you begin to branch out into ordering anything else around you, but my question would be, what kind of order? Because it appears to me that the way I've been taught success since high school and college, get a well-paying job, buy a house, build a family, all circles around a distinct form of materialism as well and for as much as I may imagine the benefits of monasticism, I know I'm personally not cut out for that level of asceticism.
I definitely like the idea of living with less. I'd be curious on your thoughts whether you think though that the Minimalist movement and the seemingly pop-up following of Marie Kondo is something brought about by the Machine or a reaction to it? Naturally I imagine there is a Christian sense of minimalism, a reduction in possession without any thought of aesthetic style.
That question of how to order yourself and which limits to live within is a personal one, there is no universal guide for what you are called to do and how you are called to live within a messed up world other than "be a saint". That doesn't necessarily mean monasticism persay. My only advice in finding that path is to pray, lots. Go somewhere silent if you find it hard, you can always go and visit a monastery even if you have no intention of going that route yourself. I just came back from a weekend staying at a Benedictine monastery and found that the silence cleared away so much junk getting in the way of God, and you will find wise people at those quiet places.
The question is why did the pursuit/gratification of pleasure become an organizing principle of culture. Instant gratification is merely the latest iteration of a centuries-old, societal-wide behavior.
Human beings started valorizing the gratification of their senses when they developed the concept of the permanent self. Any quiet, serious consideration of existence leads a person to the realization that the world is marked by impermanence. But for many (most?) people, this truth is unbearable. A permanent self with definite contours is much preferable. But how to avoid/hide from the reality of impermanence, which even modest contemplation reveals?
Simple. Make desire fulfillment central to people's lives. Human beings are desire generators par excellence. Hundreds of desires emerge in a person's life every minute. Looked at properly, all of these desires are as empty as the rest of existence, but through the simple, yet toxic, act of attaching to them, a false sense of self-permanence can be generated, and more importantly, maintained.
Having thus valorized desires, humans needed a way of distinguishing between the ones to fulfill and the ones to abstain from. Abrahamic religions came up with the categories of "Thou Shall" and "Thou Shall Not," with the result that Western culture can be read as one long, tedious history of desires being moved from one category to the other--sometimes transferred back--and sometimes inhabiting both categories at the same time.
Yet there remained the uncomfortable/discomforting reality of impermanence--a truth that advances in science made more and more apparent. Matter was solid until it wasn't, and now whether something is a wave or a particle can depend on the observer. As scientific evidence of impermanence accumulated, desire satisfaction had to accelerate to keep the truth at bay.
You suddenly seeing things for what they were brought this to mind:
"Within all phenomena,
causes and conditions are empty—
they are devoid of essence.
When you cease your [deluded] mindset
and penetrate the ultimate foundation,
such a person is called a 'true monk.'”
--The Sutra on the Auspicious Appearances and Origins of the Prince Siddhartha
Want is not the acid. Attaching to want is the acid. The belief that some wants are inherently good and others inherently bad is the acid. All wants are empty (in the Buddhist sense, not in the sense of void or nothingness). Humans will never stop generating wants, but to valorize the satisfaction of these wants in a world marked by impermanence is a fool's game.
The brake? Unattachment mixed with a dash of dependent origination and a soupcon of emptiness--all naturally occurring limits (which are the best and most effective kind). Modernity destroys limits because like other manifestations of Western culture, it valorizes desire satisfaction, declaring that wants have inherent nature (and, logically, so too must the generators of such wants).
"All phenomena are devoid of fixed nature,
But in our thoughts, they appear to be [permanently] existent.
Once you perceive emptiness,
No thoughts of them remain."
--Pratyutpanna Samadhi Sutra
All true. This leaves unanswered the question, however, of how in pragmatic terms not to be drawn into participating in this culture's delusions. What I have found, is that participation is not optional. This culture sends out the equivalent of truant officers to haul you in if you dare stop playing the game.
The Machine cedes no ground to go to, no time to find one's way out of delusion. The question is always this: where's the money? Do you have the money? We need the money, now. That's not enough. Need more money. More money, now. Where is the money? Don't talk to us about Buddhism, where is the money? WHERE IS THE MONEY?
Thanks both. Good to see some Buddhist input on here!
You are right about attachment and impermanence, Brian, I think. Interestingly, the Buddhist teaching on the matter is not so far, in some respects anyway, from the understanding of the fathers of the Eastern Church. Hesychasm can look a lot like Zen from a certain light, and 'consider the lilies of the field' is a teaching about detachment from want par excellence.
However, it's also the case, isn't it, that Buddhism comes with a long (very long, in case of monks) list of thou shalts and thou shalt nots. It's impossible to avoid that in any serious path. I'm not sure that's the issue. But I agree that detachment - or dying to the world, as the orthodox would have it - is the way through. The problem of course is that it is terrifically hard, and very few will ever achieve it.
Personally, I make a distinction between Buddhism as philosophy and Buddhism as religion. As philosophy it seems to me painfully, unavoidably true. I recall a scholar one time warning students away from Buddhism because, "it's just so sad." There is an excellent book by Steve Hagen called 'Buddhism Plain and Simple' that strips absolutely everything away except the core awareness (he keeps emphasizing, "just see... just see...") and I got more from that book than from reading anything Shantideva or Thich Nhat Hanh ever wrote.
As a religion it's of little interest to me. I recall Alan Watts speaking about Buddhist monks selling beads and prayer flags to tourists while at the same time knowing all of this stuff was silly fluff that had nothing to do with actual Buddhism. Also, your phrase "serious path" I think perhaps belies an intellectual's search for a truly satisfying spiritual and intellectual meal. Buddhism is (or can be) radically minimal and spare and simple, and when I look at my happy zen cats, I suspect anything complicated at all to be leading away from their innate embodied wisdom. This in some sense is my issue with Christianity. It involves people talking about stuff, which is a red flag. lol
Saw an interesting quote this morning, attributed to philosopher Marshall Roderick's son Rick: "Mass culture is enlightenment in reverse. The goal is precisely to wipe out that last little garrison of human autonomy."
I would argue that its a very Western and self-indulgent notion to believe that you can essentially take the bits you like of a religion and strip out everything you don't like - this is essentially what you are doing by subjectively separating Buddhist "philosophy" from Buddhist "religion". It's a perennialist approach which puts you above any particular religion, which turns out to be precisely the place to be if you don't want to be challenged or can't commit to something. I've always found that when I don't understand something or find it difficult to digest, its worth struggling with that. Often out of the struggle you realise its perhaps you that needs to change your mindset/conclusion. I'm not saying this to defend Buddhism, I don't have much knowledge of it. It's just the approach of pick and mix when it comes to religion that I don't have much time for.
I'm not "picking and mixing" religions. I have no interest in or use for *any* religion. Buddhism is often considered a philosophy, in fact it's difficult at times not to see it as a philosophy, and I find it a highly useful and instructive one. Sorry if this offends anyone, though I really can't understand why it would!
You didn't offend me at all, though it seems the opposite may be true. I was just offering my thoughts, not trying to run you down or win a debate. I will bow out on the topic!
Thanks to you for having me.
I have often thought that if I were not a Buddhist, and I might instead be a an Orthodox Christian who committed the heresy of universalism (among other deviations). I find The Sayings of the Desert Fathers very Buddhist in some ways.
As for thou shalls and thou shall nots, the Vinaya is extensive, but for Buddhist practitioners it consists of eight parts, i.e., the Noble Eightfold Path/Fourth Noble Truth:
Right Speech
Right Action
Right Livelihood
Right Effort
Right Mindfulness
Right Concentration
Right Resolve
Right View
As for unattachment (which I think is a better term than "detachment" with its connotation of indifference, which is not a characteristic of unattachment), it is not as difficult as people say/think. Look at the amazing discipline achieved by athletes, artists, and others. Didn't someone write that the Desert Fathers could be considered athletes for God?
Discipline is a good work. Spiritual vigilance, moment by moment. Every tradition teaches the need for it, presumably because it is so incredibly hard! But at this stage in my life I can't see anything else that makes much sense.
Paul, have you ever read Michael Hanby's essay in Communio called "The Culture of Death, The Ontology of Boredom, and the Resistance of Joy"? It's definitely worth reading. I'll post it below.
https://www.communio-icr.com/files/hanby31-2.pdf
Thanks for another good article to think on and reflect.