Curfew!
Monday December 7, 2009
It is almost seven o’clock in the evening, and I’m sitting down in a beanbag with a cup of tea, Bodhicattva in the beanbag next door (and looking, it has to be said, very pleased with himself), and writing a new blog post. Somehow, in the last few weeks – what with the demands of work, and the excitement of the book launch and so on – I’ve not had as much time as I would like to give to this site. Nor have I had as much time as I would like, now that I think about it, for reading and writing. Nor for meditating. Nor for simply hanging out with the cat.
But tonight, something is different. I am writing in a text-editor on my laptop, but I’ll not post what I’m writing until tomorrow morning. Because, as of a few days ago, we have a new regime; and at 6pm every night, we have decided to turn off the modem at the wall, so that we can keep our evenings internet-free.
The necessity of this regime change came home to me starkly a few days ago, when I started to ask myself why it was that I had found myself without enough time to write. It was only then that I began to wonder if the story I was telling myself (“I’ve just got too many things to do!”) was the whole and unadorned truth. And the more I thought about it, the more I realised that one of the problems was not so much the quantity of work, but the quality of attention that I was bringing to it. And one of the things that was degrading the quality of this attention was, alas, the very thing that allows me to write this blog: the internet.
Now, it is true that the internet is a great and wonderful thing. I love writing thinkBuddha.org. I love keeping in touch with friends across the globe. And when you are looking for obscure fourth century Chinese texts about tapirs (don’t even ask…), there is nothing like it. But the trouble is that there is simply too much out there. It is the perfect playground for what they call – in a somewhat hackneyed image – the monkey mind: the mind that swings through the forest, grasping now one creeper or hanging vine, now another.
There is nothing, of course, particularly wrong with the monkey mind. The monkey, very often, needs to be somewhere or other, and needs a bit of low cunning to get there efficiently. It is good to make use of the resources that are out there. And there’s certainly a kind of delight to swinging through the trees (“Oooh, look! A tapir!”). But when you find yourself checking email at ten thirty in the evening, and rubbing your brow anxiously, it is clear that there is in this particular form of 21st century madness neither purpose nor delight. The desire to “just check” what the weather is going to be tomorrow, what your email says, whether anybody has posted anything new on Chinese tapirs, or what have you, is one that can colonise far too much of your life.
The monkey grumbles for a moment, then settles down for a kip. And then the evening is free – for reading, for writing, for hanging out with the cat. And it is remarkable the difference it makes. The thing is, the internet is a demanding medium. Emails flood into your inbox in a torrent. Information is always just around the next corner. The world is happening, and asking you to be a part of it. And when life is busy, when there’s a lot to be done, it is all the easier to get tangled up in this kind of thing. But when you switch off, and then switch on again the following morning, you realise that things were not as important as all that, that the world has done perfectly well without you.
The time reclaimed by the simple flicking of a switch! Hours on end to read books, to think, to write. Life again begins to feel rounder, calmer, less restless, saner. The various things that need to be done – all good things, all things worth doing – seem less burdensome and more pleasurable. The evening is no longer filled with fretful monkey business, but feels more like an oasis. And the pile of books and articles that I had, until now, given up hope of reading until next summer, is beginning already to dwindle.
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What's It All About?
Wednesday March 11, 2009
If you have not visited thinkBuddha.org before, you may be wondering what this blog is about. If you have visited it before, you may be still puzzled. And, as I sit down to write this, find that I too am scratching my head to find a way of summing it up. So I’m indebted to wordle.net, for their nice online application that parses websites and provides a word-cloud representing the most common terms that appear on the site in question.
As I’ve noted on this blog before, and as the archaeologists know, if you want to know what people really get up to, you don’t ask them (particularly if you are an archaeologist, because the people in question are almost always not in a fit state to answer), but you do sneaky things like poking through their rubbish bins. Similarly, if you want to know what people are really interested in, then perhaps instead of asking them to account for themselves, and facing the inevitable spin that comes from this self-accounting, you can just see which words and topics come up most often when they actually go about the business of writing and speaking.
And so here is a word-cloud, looking rather like an elegant concrete poem, of what I’m interested in here at thinkBuddha.org (or at least, what appears at the moment on the front page of thinkBuddha.org). The words the crop up more often are larger and more prominent, whilst the ones that are less common are smaller, in the same way that in medieval paintings the important figures loom large, whilst the less important ones are diminutive. The image, by the way, is clickable, so you are free to study it at your leisure.
Now for a bit of analysis. It appears that I’m somewhat interested in Buddhism, although (worryingly for some) I also seem to be interested in errancy. Consciousness figures highly, somewhat on a par with wandering, and I also like stories (between these three things – consciousness, wandering and stories – there may, methinks, be a connection…) And thought seems to also be something that I think about rather a lot.
Best of all, however, is the word that was boldly emblazoned across the middle of the image, giving me at last a precise and unambiguous answer to what this blog is about: SOMETHING.
That’s right, folks. What concerns me, above all else, is something. Reassuring, no?
Images created by Wordle.net are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License
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Blogging Philosophy Part II: Hanging Out with the Peasants
Friday January 30, 2009
In the early 1930s, the Soviet ethnographer, psychologist and linguist A. R. Luria travelled to Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan to explore the modes of thinking of the non-literate peasants of outer reaches of what was then the Soviet Union. Like all good ethnographers, Luria spent a fair amount of time baffling (and perhaps entertaining) his subjects with bizarre questions. ‘In the Far North,’ he asked, ‘where there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya Zembla is in the Far North and there is always snow there. What colour are the bears?’ The man Luria put this question to thought for a while. And then he said, ‘I don’t know. I’ve seen a black bear. I’ve never seen any others…
Luria tried another tack, setting the following somewhat Gradgrindish task: ‘Try to explain to me,’ he said, ‘what a tree is.’ This was greeted by puzzlement: ‘Why should I? Everyone knows what a tree is, they don’t need me telling them.’ Which is, of course, quite true, even if there are some difficult borderline cases (is this bush a tree? this plastic Christmas tree? this picture of a tree?)
Luria, however, was undeterred, and so asked something that seemed closer to home, something much more intimate, something that surely could not generate this degree of perplexity. ‘What sort of person are you,’ he asked, ‘what’s your character like, what are your good qualities and shortcomings?’ Most of us would have little difficulty in answering this question, even if we might have problems answering it honestly; but the people Luria interviewed seemed perplexed. One man replied, ‘What can I say about my own heart? How can I talk about my character? Ask others; they can tell you about me. I myself can’t say anything.’
What was going on in these strange examples of miscommunication? Were Luria’s peasants obstinate? Were they slow-witted? Or else were they playing that popular game – a game far more popular perhaps than most of us realise – of tease the ethnographer?
Or – perhaps more intriguingly – none of these. Walter Ong, from who I have borrowed this story, suggests that what is going on here goes much, much deeper than any of these explanations might suggest. In his book Orality and Literacy
Luria’s questions are very much the kind that we might recognise as a philosopher’s questions. The first deals with syllogistic logic:
- All bears in the North are white
- Novaya Zembla is in the North
- The bears in Novaya Zembla (if bears there be) are white.
The second deals with the business of definition – what is a tree? – and with the division of the world into firm categories. The law of the excluded middle: tree or not-tree. The third question deals with what some philosophers call ‘interiority’ and others call ‘the view from within,’ the self-evidence of consciousness. Yet these three questions do not seem to much preoccupy – nor indeed do they seem to make much sense to – Luria’s interlocutors.
This opens up a somewhat alarming possibility: perhaps, to put it succinctly, those things that the philosophers like to claim are central to what it is to be human are far more peripheral than we would like to believe. If we take away formalised syllogistic logic, concern with rigorous definition and reflection from within upon human character, it is no longer clear that what we call philosophy is possible at all.
Walter Ong relates the birth of the kinds of questions that Luria asked – about syllogistic logic, about definition and about the view from within – to the move from cultures that are exclusively oral to cultures that are, at least to some degree, literate. There is not room here to explore the richness of Ong’s arguments – although his book is well worth reading – but what I am interested in here are three things. Firstly, the suggestion that the kinds of questions that we think of as crucial and fundamental may be much more local affairs than we imagine. Secondly, that the kinds of questions that philosophers ask, and the way they ask them, may be rooted in the technologies of writing and the changes to human consciousness that have resulted from these technologies. And thirdly, that as a result, philosophy may not speak for all humankind (as some philosophers claim), but instead for particular kinds of human. It is not that Luria’s Uzbek and Kirghiz friends were in any way deficient in their mental capacities, it is not that they were lacking in what might be called quickness of wit, but only that they were possessed of the kinds of minds for which questions about abstract bears, definitions of trees, and elaborate self-reflexivity were simply not compelling, or simply failed to make any sense.
Nevertheless, we should step back a bit to remember that, even if philosophy is not possible in such conditions, then surely wisdom is. Luria and his Uzbek and Kirghiz companions may have had difficulty in understanding each other when it came to the question of how one might establish the colour of bears (if bears there be) in Novaya Zembla; but one suspects that they would have agreed that it would be unwise, were one to meet a bear – whether white or black or any other colour – to go and tickle it behind the ears, or to attempt to give it a hug. Similarly, whilst they might not have seen exactly eye-to-eye when it came to the question of what a tree exactly was, perhaps they could have reached a kind of homely accord by agreeing that it was a wise man who planted apple trees so that, in a few years time, he could have a ready supply of apples. Not only this, but they might both have agreed that wisdom is something to be cherished, something worthy of love. Wisdom, in this sense, is nothing particularly grand. It is not about securing a deep and esoteric understanding of the world; but in this everyday sense, whatever their philosophical differences, Luria the peasants have no difficulty in discoursing about ordinary everyday wisdom relating to bears and apple trees. To put it in philosophical language: philosophical ways of thinking – at least, what we perhaps think of as philosophical ways of thinking – may provide neither the necessary nor the sufficient conditions for wisdom.
Now, here comes the intriguing bit. Walter Ong traces not only the transformations that may have taken place between purely oral cultures and literate cultures, but he goes on to consider how the invention of movable type and the readily accessible printed text in turn may have had a profound influence on the way that our minds are structured. And although Ong does not explore the implications of this specifically for philosophy, it would be possible, I think, to map transformations in what we call philosophy on to these changes in material and technological conditions, the birth of philosophy coming about with the particular kind of consciousness associated with writing (a process you can see not only in the West, but also in India with the change from texts like the Vedas to the Upanishads and the Buddhist Suttas, and in China with the move from stark works such as the Yijing to the likes of Laozi); and with the move, after the era of Gutenberg’s printing press, towards a kind of supercharged philosophy in which there was an ever greater concern with inwardness (think Descartes and Husserl), rigorous systematisation (think Kant and Hegel) and rigorous definition (think Frege).
But it doesn’t stop at Gutenberg. For Ong suggests that with the advent of mass-media communication, we are moving into a period of ‘secondary orality’ that ‘has a striking resemblance to the old in its participatory mystique, its fostering of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment…’ This was written before the appearance on the scene of the internet, but it seems prescient. As some scholars have suggested (see this paper by Tom Pettitt) we may be moving beyond the ‘Gutenberg Parenthesis’ in which the authority of the book reigned supreme, and this may have profound effects on the kinds of beings that we are, the kinds of minds that we have, and the kinds of thoughts that we are capable of having.
This may, depending on your perspective be either a) exhilarating, b) alarming or c) a load of nonsense; but what it suggests is that the kind of thinking that goes on in internet writing (and, perhaps more generally, in an age saturated by electronic mass media) is fundamentally different from the kind of thinking that goes in within the pages and cultures of the book. If this is so, then we would expect philosophy itself to start to take on a rather different character, to begin to reshape itself. Philosophy, post-Gutenberg Parenthesis, may look very different from the kind of philosophy that Kant or Hegel or Descartes wrote.
How this might already be happening will be the subject of my next post in this series. But for the time being, perhaps it is worth saying this: that whatever the implications for the future character of philosophy, and however philosophy itself may be changed by electronic mass media, what perhaps matters more is that we might be able through all of this to maintain some degree of wisdom: enough, at least, to allow us to refrain from getting too close to bears, and to remind us to plant apple trees so that we might, one day, have a decent crop.
Read the previous post in this series on the virtues of amateurism. Part three to follow soon!
Image: Ansgar Walk / Wikimedia Commons
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New Forums
Thursday April 24, 2008
The estimable Loden Jinpa from Down Under has just got in touch to say that he has set up a new forum for Buddhist discussion, with a sub-forum on “fusion philosophy” – a term that comes from Mark Siderits – which may be of interest to visitors to thinkBuddha.
There’s a link here.
The Pragmatic Buddhist
Thursday April 3, 2008
It has been a busy couple of weeks, with a few days away in Derbyshire for Easter, three days up at Keele University for the immensely enjoyable conference of the British Society for Literature and Science where I was talking about Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist
So in the absence of anything particularly compelling to say – at least for the next couple of days – over here in these parts, I would like to direct you to the website of The Pragmatic Buddhist, an estimable publication from the folks at the Center for Pragmatic Buddhism which combines Buddhism, science, philosophy, pragmatism, reflections on meditative practice and a pinch of Taoism, to make a fine and heady brew.
Right! Happy reading. I’m off to pack my bags again…
thinking Bloggers
Wednesday April 4, 2007
There’s a bit of a buzz going around about the thinking Blogger awards, and I’m very grateful for those who have nominated me for one (CafePhilos, Yang-May’s excellent Fusion View and old-hand Nacho at the Woodmoor Village Zendo).
The thinking Blogger awards work as a web-based meme, in a fashion somewhat akin to the way that pyramid selling and chain letters work. Each person nominated (or ‘tagged’) is strongly encouraged to nominate (or ‘tag’) five more people. And so it doesn’t take long for the number of thinking blogger nominees to skyrocket (and, incidentally, for the currency to become debased).
So I’m going to pass on passing this one on, although I appreciate being nominated by these fine fellow-bloggers of mine; but if you want some good, intelligent reading, there are some places you can find it on my link-list.
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Saffron Spam Scam?
Friday January 12, 2007
This morning I opened my email to find a courteous e-mail from two Sri Lankan Buddhist monks. They were interested, they said, in visiting my Buddhist centre (my Buddhist centre?!!!), where they hoped to spend a few fraternal days learning my traditions. Humble fellows that they were, these two pious men said they were willing to sleep on “any floor”, and would partake only of vegetarian meals, to be eaten before noon.
I am not entirely sure what traditions the two so-called monks were referring to – perhaps the daily ritual of arguing with the cat about when his dinner is due, which goes something like this:
Bod [entering the room]: Meow.
Me: Not now, Bod, it’s only four o’clock.
Bod: Purr, purr, meow, meow.
Me: Why don’t you go and do something nice for an hour and come back when it is the right time?
Bod [Leaping on the desk and walking all over whatever I’m working on]. Purr, purr. Meow. Purr.
Me: Push off you oaf!
Bod: Meow…
etc. etc. for the next hour.
Anyway, as I continued to read the email, I inevitably discovered that these reverend visitors needed a little assistance in getting here. In fact, they were keen to stress that they required my full assistance, adding that they “expected that I’d never refuse their request”.
Sorry, gents. Not this time. According to the Network of Buddhist Organisations’s notices page, these saffron-tinged spam e-mails have been in circulation since at least 2004, and are a part of a visa scam. Spam, eh? And I thought they said they were vegetarian.
If you get any such e-mails, the solution is very easy: just click delete.
Image: Cobalt123 on Flickr
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