All posts by Robert M Ellis

About Robert M Ellis

Robert M Ellis is the founder of the Middle Way Society, and author of a number of books on Middle Way Philosophy, including the introductory 'Migglism' and the new Middle Way Philosophy series published by Equinox. A former teacher, he now runs a retreat centre in Wales, Tirylan House, and is in the process of creating a forest garden there.

Why the left fails – and how it can succeed

Culture, Current Affairs, Politics, Psychology

The UK is still reeling from the election results of a few days ago, in which Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party not only won a majority, but did so by capturing many traditional working-class seats across the north and midlands of England. Australia has experienced a similar election recently, whilst the US got there first with the surprise election of Trump in 2016. The devastating surprise in all of these elections seems to lie in how far working class people are prepared to vote against what seem clearly their own interests: namely, against improvements in the public spending they rely upon, and in favour of grossly inconsistent right wing governments, supported by big business interests who evade tax and impose exploitative working conditions on them. That’s even before we get onto the pressing issue of climate change, where all our interests are deeply threatened, and the right wing responses are generally either denialist or inadequately weak. The jokes about turkeys voting for Christmas have abounded.

But beyond that, how can we helpfully understand and learn from the underlying problem here? Very few analyses seem to drill down to the most basic issue, which is one of human judgement. Applying the Middle Way, one tries to avoid absolute assumptions, whether negative or positive – which in this case probably means avoiding the single cause fallacy. Why, then, do so many working class people – whether in Workington, Brisbane or Des Moines – persist in voting like turkeys? It’s very easy to take one kind of explanation and absolutise it, in accordance with the particular political concerns your experience has equipped you with, but in the process avoid the most basic underlying issues. We can blame leaders, we can blame biased and sometimes false media coverage, we can blame party policies and manifestos, we can blame party tactics, or even voter stupidity. All of these factors are no doubt part of the picture, but they need to take their place in relation to the question of human judgement. What actually decides the values that actuate people when they cast their vote?

In understanding this, I’ve found the following video from Rebel Wisdom helpful. It mentions a couple of things that I think are very relevant. One of these is the analysis of six foundational political values by Jonathan Haidt (authority, loyalty, sanctity, care, justice, freedom) – see my review of his book. Another is an idea that comes from Ken Wilber – the pre/trans fallacy: namely that people often react against a later stage of integrative development that has incorporated the more helpful elements of an earlier one, because they mistake it for the earlier stage. I do recommend watching the video if you have time, although it’s 35 minutes long. It doesn’t answer all the questions that I think need to be asked (which I continue with below), but it provides a very good starting point.

Where this video leaves us is with the idea of “performative contradiction”, namely the idea that the left contradicts itself unconsciously by committedly extolling the values of care and justice, but doing so in a way that feels exclusive to working-class people. Whilst I think that’s a good point, I also think it’s not sufficient to leave it there, because it has the implication that the left is to blame for being too exclusive by being intellectual, middle class etc, when these are largely just part of the conditions that middle class left wingers are working with.

However, if we take the six foundational values of Haidt and probe them further, we can start to ask what the values of working class people may be, and why they are opposed to those of middle class left wingers. The obvious answer seems to lie in those values identified by Haidt as more collective ones: authority, loyalty and sanctity. Haidt’s major point is that conservatives combine these three values with the others (care, justice and freedom), but ‘liberals’ (in the American sense) concentrate only on care, justice and freedom and fail to understand why anyone values authority, loyalty or sanctity. This is also somewhat hypocritical of the left, of course, because left wingers, being human, do have their own values of authority, loyalty and sanctity, but they tend to confine them to private life (family, friendships, religion, maybe business or professional relationships). Left wingers just don’t feel it’s appropriate to make political judgements on the basis of authority, loyalty or sanctity, meaning that they are more likely to be anti-elite, internationalist and anti-religious.

But do the working classes share these ‘left wing’ or ‘liberal’ types of value? It seems obvious to me that the majority do not, and the psychological preferences of the majority help to create cultural trends that subsume many more (such as the popularity of Brexit). Why, then, have working class voters in industrial towns across northern England traditionally voted Labour? Obviously care, justice and freedom are of some concern to these voters, but they are not prepared to use them as a sole basis of judgement without a good helping of authority, loyalty and sanctity to help them along. In traditional industrial northern England (where I spent much of my childhood) these sources of authority, loyalty and sanctity were clearly present in working class culture. Socialist leaders, some of working class origins, provided authority. Working class solidarity itself, particularly exercised through the unions, the pubs and the churches, provided the basis of loyalty. In the past, voting Tory would have been an unthinkably disloyal thing to do. Sanctity, too, was present in the power particularly of non-conformist Christianity in the earlier Labour movement. Even in the 1970’s, when I was growing up amongst the small towns south east of Manchester, the churches of each town would all parade with their banners and assemble outside the town hall, dressed up in pride for the ‘Whit Walks’ every Whitsuntide Sunday: a display uniting the sanctity and solidarity of the churches, the town and civic society (see this link for pictures: one of which is here). However, under the impact of social and economic change, these sources of value are largely gone: church attendance has plummeted, pubs have closed, and unions have been seriously weakened. The left has become an increasingly middle class phenomenon, including those who may have been born into the working class but adopted middle class culture and expectations. The working classes are left to rudderless individualism.

I think there’s a further theoretical perspective that can shed light on this: that’s the work of Robert Kegan on the stages of adult psychological development. Kegan extended the work previously done by Piaget on how children develop, in the process identifying some quite well-definable stages in both the cognitive development and the changing values of adults. The video below gives an introduction to the five stages of development in Kegan’s thought.

The vast majority of adults are at either what Kegan would call the ‘interpersonal’ stage (stage 3), or at the ‘institutional’ stage (stage 4). In the interpersonal stage, we rely to a greater extent on other people’s approval as the basis of our values, so we could expect this to largely correspond to the ‘conservative’ six values thinking in Haidt’s analysis. If your relationship with others is the prime basis of your values, then authority and loyalty will continue to be important to your judgement. Care, justice and freedom will also be part of the mix, but not by themselves in too much abstraction from the social context to which you feel your loyalty. It is only when people are able to move on to stage 4 that they are likely to be able to adopt those ‘liberal’ values: justice, care and freedom applied systematically beyond the bounds of immediate group loyalties. If they are able to move beyond stage 4 into the ‘interindividual’ stage 5, they will then see the limitations even of these systemically applied values and how their interpretation is limited by contextual assumptions – but only a relatively small number of people manage this. Mistaking stage 5 for regression to stage 3 is the pre/trans fallacy mentioned above.

The crucial factor in people’s lives that helps them to shift from stage 3 to stage 4, according to Kegan, is likely to be either university study or the demands of a profession. To do either of these, generally speaking, you are forced to adopt more systematic habits of mind, and to adopt a standpoint beyond that of loyalty to your background group or social class. However, when you get a university degree or join a profession you almost by definition become middle class, and in the process are likely to adjust your peer groups, your housing, your location, and your voting habits. I can’t find any research that has been done on the correlation between Kegan’s stages and social class, but I would be astonished if there does not turn out to be a strong correlation when such research is done.

So, to return to the main theme, why does the left fail? Why do the working classes fail to support it? My hypothesis for the key answer is that they fail to support it because they are still at stage 3, and thus because they still require authority, loyalty and perhaps sanctity as an element in the basic values of what they will support. The reason is thus not primarily leadership, policies, media or tactics, although these all undoubtedly interact with people’s basic values and produce smaller short term changes in voting habits. With the growing individualism in society, the working classes have lost whatever basis of loyalty to the left they ever had. Instead, the conditions that produce systematic thought about the application of care, justice and freedom (along with systematic thought about how to respond to issues like climate change) are overwhelmingly those of university education.

The voting figures for the recent UK general election show big disparities, not just by region, but by age and education. According to YouGov, age and education are now clearly the most important indicators of voting intention. The following graphs show just how big that disparity is. But it needs to be remembered that these are not just social categories – they are also psychological ones determining how people make judgements.

So, how can the left succeed? Not by wooing the working classes back, but by coming to terms with the fact that the basis of left wing support is education – and that this means that in the longer-term, conditions are on their side. All they have to do is maintain the support of a majority of educated voters, and wait for higher levels of education to filter through the population. Of course, anything they can do to support and spread education is also part of the key to success. Reforming education itself so that it is more effective – including basic knowledge of the political system and more effective teaching of critical thinking skills for all – would also help.

The removal of unnecessary divisions on the left would also help a great deal to get them into power sooner rather than later. In the UK Labour and the Liberal Democrats are competing with each other and splitting the anti-Conservative vote in many seats, with the first past the post system making this disastrous in its effects. These parties need to merge or ally themselves in order to stand a chance, because they are largely fishing in the same pool of educated voters. the only differences between them lie in the degree of emphasis between the three ‘liberal’ values, with Labour emphasising care and justice rather more, and the Lib Dems trying to strike a balance between justice/ care on the one hand a freedom on the other. Their commonalities are much more important than their differences. Both parties now face a change of leadership, and it is to be hoped that the new leaders see the sense of creating an alliance rather than competing. In the Labour party, though, this means facing down those who are attached to the Marxist belief that social change must be instigated by the oppressed themselves: Haidt and Kegan between them have shown that this is wrong.

In my personal judgement, in the embodied situation I find myself in politically, a Middle Way judgement means that one needs to support the left. However, I can well understand that people will reach different political judgements by sincerely applying the Middle Way in different circumstances. I support the left, not because of any absolute commitment to care, justice or freedom (I think these need to be balanced with the other values, making me in some ways a small-c conservative – see blog on this), but because I think justice, particularly, has been neglected in the Western world since the rise of neo-liberalism in the 1980’s, and because systematic thinking is overwhelmingly needed to address climate change. My political views are pragmatically led. This is not the time for exaggerated suspicions of the state, nor for any other distraction from the big picture of the conditions we need to address and the best way of getting there. Nor is it time to give up hope. Tony Blair had many weaknesses with his strengths as a leader, but he seemed to be right in one well-known statement of his priorities: “Education, education, education”.

 

Cutting the Gordian Knot

Current Affairs, Middle Way Philosophy, Politics, Religion

The ability to cut through complexity and reach a simple resolution has an obvious appeal, yet ‘shortcuts’ can also be very damaging because they fail to engage with complexity. Are shortcuts always absolutisations? The story of Alexander the Great cutting through the Gordian Knot has always appealed to me. Here were lots of people arguing with endless complexity about how to untie the knot, and Alexander saw intuitively that all this complexity was unnecessary and unhelpful – so he cut the knot! Can this be justified?

I think it can. Absolutisations are always shortcuts, but shortcuts are not always absolutisations. Sometimes shortcuts are the best practical response to a situation in which continuing to try to address complexity is just creating more and more loops of conflict. Endless complex debate can also reinforce a certain limited framework within which a problem is being understood, with the boundaries strangely being reinforced by the complexity of discussion. Complexity is always there, and things are indeed likely to be more complex than we recognise, but that does not necessarily imply that a response that tries to limitlessly deal with complexity is the best one for us as agents within that system.

Alternative examples to Alexander cutting the Gordian Know can be found everywhere. For example, I think that agnosticism about God is a good example. The ramifications of theological debate about God’s ‘existence’ are endless, but their complexity depends on particular conceptual assumptions that do not actually help us address the complexity of conditions. Cutting the Gordian Knot here means pointing out that it’s totally irrelevant to our experience of phenomena (including religious experience), and of value, whether or not God ‘exists’ as a supernatural entity. The obsession with God’s ‘existence’ consists of a set of assumptions that we can simply cast aside. As long as we are caught up in the complexity of the arguments, that approach seems unthinkable, until one moment when it simply occurs to us that we don’t actually have to take a position on all of this. We can cast the burden aside and walk free.

But how can we tell when it’s justifiable to cut a Gordian Knot, rather than try to face up to complexity? I’d suggest that the key test is not about complexity at all, but about whether we’re facing up to alternatives. If we are offered alternatives that we simply ignore or dismiss because they are ‘off the map’ (not because of a reasonable judgement about their credibility), then the chances are that we are absolutizing, whether the alternative we’re ruling out is simple or complex. In the case of agnosticism about God, in most cases agnostics have tried out the arguments about God’s ‘existence’ and found them only productive of conflict, and have then recognised agnosticism as an alternative. Theists and atheists, on the other hand, routinely misunderstand, ignore or dismiss agnosticism: they have not engaged with it as a genuine option. On the other hand, many British attitudes to the EU routinely ignore its complexity, especially by jumping to the conclusion that it is ‘anti-democratic’, without examining the great complexity around the question either of what democracy means, or what it would mean for a supra-national body to be appropriately democratic. In this case, in my view the failure to face up to complexity is also a failure to consider alternatives to the easy view one has adopted, or to break out of the limited assumptions of a particular discourse.

My thoughts on this question have been especially stimulated recently by the Brexit impasse as it is continuing to ramify in the UK. I have taken a great interest in the complexity of these events, and am inclined at times to feel frustrated at the failure of most members of the public to engage with this complexity. However, I’m also beginning to think that one particular simple answer may in practice be the best one: that is, the recently adopted Liberal Democrat policy of simply revoking Article 50 and thus ending the whole Brexit debacle through one parliamentary action. It’s been pointed out to me that this would not be ‘simple’ at all, because it would create a lot of resistance, but this is where we also need to avoid the nirvana fallacy and compare different possible courses of action with each other rather than with an impossible ideal. The UK is deadlocked because there is great resistance to any possible course of action – so the choice seems to be between different actions that would all create great resistance: no-deal, deal, second referendum or revocation. Of these, the first three all threaten to prolong the impasse, because of the contradictions and impracticality in the case for Brexit itself. Only revocation seems to stand a chance of ending it in the long-term: but its simplicity seems to be one of the main barriers. Those who have been trying to engage with the complexity for so long can no longer believe that it might be that simple: just let go!

Part of the problem with discussing this topic also seems to be that people’s assumptions about what is ‘simple’ and what is ‘complex’ vary hugely with their background and perspective. If we are accustomed to dealing with complexity in a certain subject area, our handling of the concepts gets gradually easier, so it no longer seems ‘complex’ to us at all. Things that seem simple in one respect may also be complex in another – as I think is the case with Middle Way Philosophy in general, which is simple in its key idea, but complex in its application. However, we can probably all agree that cutting the Gordian Knot is a relatively simple action compared to trying to untie it. I expect lots of disagreement with my views on the two contentious examples I have used – God and Brexit, but the key point in my view will be not so much whether you are prepared to  cut Gordian knots on occasion, but what your approach is to judging those occasions. Can you face up to alternatives, even if those alternatives sometimes seem unacceptably simple rather than unacceptably complex? That is an ongoing practice for everyone.

Picture: Alexander cutting the Gordian Knot by Lorenzo de Ferrari (Wikimedia Commons/ Carlo Dell’Orto CCBYSA 4.0)

Buddhism 2.0? Stephen Batchelor’s vision of Secular Buddhism

Books, Buddhism, Religion,

At the time I was writing ‘The Buddha’s Middle Way’ (published this year), in 2017, I was able to refer to Stephen Batchelor’s 2015 book ‘After Buddhism’ as its nearest forerunner, but I had not yet read Batchelor’s collection of essays ‘Secular Buddhism’, which was only published in 2017. Reading that further book, more recently, I don’t think it would have made a huge difference to any of the (largely positive) things I said about Batchelor’s work. However, its essay ‘A Secular Buddhism’ does seem to be the nearest thing to a manifesto Batchelor has produced, and I guess that it’s one of the most influential statements to date of what ‘secular Buddhism’ means. For that reason, if no other, I feel it’s worth engaging with and responding to.

The reason I’ve been increasingly interested in Batchelor’s work, and have also been very glad to meet him personally, is not because I identify myself with the label ‘secular Buddhist’ (though I have been through an earlier phase when I used the term). However, I continue to be interested in what lies behind it – namely a fruitful process of deep critical thinking about Buddhist tradition, parallel to the similar process that is going on in relation to many other traditions.

Batchelor’s other metaphor for what he means by ‘Secular Buddhism’, ‘Buddhism 2.0’ appeals to me a little more. Despite its IT connotations, and the danger that these connotations will be taken too literally or reductively, it does convey the key idea of changing the paradigm that creates key assumptions about Buddhist practice. To do ‘Buddhism 2.0’ you don’t have to change your “hardware” (i.e. your body and brain) nor your specific app (e.g. ethical or meditation practice), but you do need to change the “operating system” that gives a wider formatting to your practice. You need to do so because the old operating system is no longer well-adapted to a new set of conditions. That’s a metaphor that could just as easily be applied to the reform of other traditions: e.g. Christianity 2.0, Science 2.0, or Liberalism 2.0.

The switch from one operating system to another may also seem like a sudden one, because it involves a disengagement from one set of connected assumptions in order to re-engage with another. Batchelor captures this very well when he writes about a “gestalt switch” from a metaphysical interpretation of Buddhist doctrines to a pragmatic one. In the work of Robert Kegan on levels of adult psychological development, that switch can be seen as the one between level 4 (thinking based on paradigmatic rational rules) to level 5 (flexibly moving between paradigms with a practical justification).

When this switch occurs, how does the new ‘operating system’ differ from the old one? Here, the key point where I agree with Batchelor wholeheartedly is that the new operating system is pragmatic whilst the old is dogmatic. The question, however, is what exactly “pragmatic” means. The implications of pragmatism need to be simultaneously pursued both in theory and in practise if they are to provide a strong enough alternative to the dogmas people are used to relying on. The more long-term and universal one tries to make one’s pragmatism, the further one will need to look beyond one’s personal experience and one’s immediate audience, and thus the wider and more fruitful one’s pragmatism is likely to become. Batchelor’s strength is that of communicating new possible approaches to people who are interested in Buddhism in a way that can inspire them and is consistent with practical experience. However, his limitations lie more in the area of how much he critically examines the perspectives he offers, to make his pragmatism more universal.

This takes me to my concerns about the framing of ‘Buddhism 2.0’ as ‘Secular Buddhism’. In his essay ‘Secular Buddhism’, Batchelor starts off by trying to clarify exactly what he means by that term. Let’s start with ‘Secular’. Batchelor says that there are three senses of secularity he is using: (1) opposition to religion, (2) being concerned with this world, and (3) involving a transfer of authority from ‘church’ to ‘state’. If that is what ‘secular’ means, then identifying my approach with any of them would worry me, because they all seem to rely on a (thoroughly false, in my view) dichotomy between ‘secularity’ and ‘religion’. If we state that we are concerned with this world, that seems to imply that we are still avoiding concern with another one, and if we are transferring authority away from religious institutions, this also suggests that we are rejecting religious institutions as holders of power. Surely that is continuing with the old paradigm, but just flipping our priorities within that paradigm, rather than adopting a new one? To adopt a new pragmatic paradigm, surely we need to apply the same sorts of autonomous criteria to critique both ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ spheres, recognising that religion is a complex system embedded in human societies?

There are, indeed, other possible uses of the term ‘secularism’, that I think may get a bit closer to what I take Batchelor to mean. Charles Taylor, in his big book ‘A Secular Age’ offers another alternative sense of secularity, as a transition “from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others”. The phenomenon of secular thinking has given us options that were not there before: to follow the church, to think oppositely to the church, and potentially, also, to break the dichotomous paradigm on which the popular view of religion as absolute belief depends. That’s a type of secularism I would personally find it much easier to sign up to: both individually and socio-politically, I think it’s very important to maintain those options. But secularists would need to be a great deal clearer about this as the prime reason for secularism than they tend to be for me to sign on the dotted line. Batchelor’s account of it does not suggest that it’s this kind of definition that he has in mind.

The other side of Batchelor’s account of ‘Secular Buddhism’ is the ‘Buddhist’ part. Here it may be helpful to quote him at some length.

On what grounds would such a Buddhism 2.0 be able to claim that it is “Buddhism” rather than something else altogether? Clearly, it would need to be founded on canonical source texts, be able to offer a convincing interpretation of key practices, doctrines, and ethical precepts, and to provide a sufficiently rich and integrated theoretical model of the dharma to serve as the basis for a flourishing human existence. (p.80)

Firstly, here, I wonder why he is so concerned as to whether ‘Secular Buddhism’ could possibly be mistaken for “something else altogether”. It’s a worry I’ve also encountered amongst many other Buddhists when discussing these issues, to such an extent that when I asked one Buddhist scholar why he was so narrowly focused on the Buddhist tradition, he answered “because I’m a Buddhist” – as though that answered the question! It should hardly be necessary to point out to Buddhists that essentialism is not part of their brief. Surely, if the practices work, it matters not in the least whether they are thought of as ‘Buddhism’? What matters practically, in relation to the Buddhist tradition, is whether it is a source of inspiration and practical support for spiritual progress, not what we call it. Its practical function as a tradition does depend on continuity, but not on essentiality, and helpful continuity can be maintained without essential identity.

Charitably assuming, then, that what Batchelor wants here more deeply is an effective practical relationship to Buddhist tradition rather than ultimate grounds for claiming that it is not ‘something else’, we can then find three criteria for it in the quotation above, only two of which are obviously pragmatic. A convincing interpretation of all the elements of the tradition is undoubtedly needed to maintain helpful continuity with it, and “a sufficiently rich and integrated model of it” to be practically helpful is also a pragmatic criterion. Why ever, though, does it need to be “founded on canonical source texts”?
There seems to be a contradiction between this criterion and Batchelor’s approach on the very next page:

The more I am seduced by the force of my own arguments, the more I am tempted to imagine that my secular version of Buddhism is what the Buddha originally taught, which the traditional schools have either lost sight of or distorted. This would be a mistake, or it is impossible to read the historical Buddha’s mind in order to know what he “really” meant or intended. (p.81)

Why does secular Buddhism need to be “founded on canonical source texts” if these very source texts have such a highly debatable relationship to the Buddha? Even if the scholarly lines of transmission were clearer than they are, would there not also be a basic issue of responsibility here? If we have responsibility for our practice, surely we cannot take any “canonical source text” as a complete account of it? Once we take responsibility for an idea, its source becomes irrelevant.

However, responsibility needs to be exercised in interpreting Batchelor as well as in interpreting scriptures. I’m fairly sure, having met him and discussed some of these issues, that he would deny that he intended “canonical source texts” to be an absolute source of authority. Nevertheless, I think there is a major issue about what one implies when one argues about such texts. In my own book ‘The Buddha’s Middle Way’, I have tried to make it extremely clear that I am using source texts from the Pali Canon as a source of inspiration rather than as a source of ‘truth’. Even then I found that some early readers of my draft book did not understand this approach, assuming that any reference to the texts was effectively an appeal to authority, and any changed interpretation must be based on a rival historical or textual claim of some kind. Appealing to authority is such an engrained habit in every sphere of religion, that one has to make a supreme effort even to open the Overton Window to other possibilities. People will still read in what they are used to even when you try to make it very explicit. In the absence of an extremely explicit statement about how one is using texts, then, I think it is very difficult to avoid the presumption, in readers if not in the writer, that one is offering a new version of what the Buddha “really” meant. For that reason I would like Batchelor to be very much more explicit on this point.

I think Batchelor’s concern with the dating and origin of texts also leaves him open to this interpretation. Sometimes the fact that one text is earlier or later than another is an informative part of the total story it offers and its significance. For example, knowing that ‘The Tempest’ is a late play of Shakespeare’s does make a difference to our appreciation of it, as we can understand the echoes of Shakespeare himself in the character of Prospero. In a similar way, awareness that the ‘Chapter of Eights’ in the Sutta Nipata is probably a very early text may help us to interpret it contextually. However, the dating of religious texts is very often part of an authority game in which the earlier text is taken to ‘win’ as the reward for a convincing (but unavoidably fallible) scholarly argument. In such cases, it has nothing much to do with the meaning of the text. Claims about dating may become hostages to fortune, and the practical meaning of the text very quickly becomes submerged in scholarly competitiveness. I very much feel that serious pragmatism demands agnosticism about claims that are heavily associated with the authority of texts, at least as the default option.

Overall, then, I think Batchelor’s account of secular Buddhism, though it has the great virtue of engaging many people in a pragmatic critique of Buddhist tradition, leaves a great deal that is of importance still unresolved or unnecessarily open to unhelpful interpretations. One reason for this is that it tries to use the concept of ‘secularism’ for a purpose for which it is ill-equipped. The other is that it remains unclear in practice how committed Batchelor is to a pragmatic interpretation, rather than one that continues (at least implicitly) to rely on tradition through the historical appeal to canonical sources.

Of course, I also think that one underlying reason for these limitations in Batchelor’s account is his neglect of the Middle Way, which really only gets passing mentions here and there, and is never really highlighted as important, despite all Batchelor’s discussion of the character and teachings of the Buddha. As Batchelor was kind enough to write an appreciative foreword for ‘The Buddha’s Middle Way’, I hope this may change in future. The key point missing here so far, though, is that, although Batchelor recognises that metaphysics is a problem, he doesn’t show any recognition that negative metaphysics is just as much of a problem as positive. As negative metaphysics in reaction to positive is such a feature of many interpretations of secularism, this is obviously a crucial reason for being cautious about identifying oneself with it.

Fractal adaptivity

Meaning, Middle Way Philosophy, Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Systems Theory,

Should the concept of adaptivity (or adaptiveness) not itself be adaptive? In my work on Middle Way Philosophy, I’ve often found myself arguing that a traditional way of thinking about a concept that may have worked in a past context is too restrictive for the present one. Moving on from the limitations of Buddhist ways of thinking of the Middle Way as lying between ‘eternalism’ and ‘nihilism’ is one example of this, and another (that I’m working on for my next book) is the need to move on from Jungian accounts of archetypes as innate features of the ‘collective unconscious’. In both cases, the alternative needs to be a more universal and thoroughly functional account of the concept, helpful to all people in all places rather than tied to a limiting paradigm. We owe a huge debt to the people who developed these concepts, but need to pass on the flame rather than worshipping the conceptual ashes. So it seems, also, with the concept of adaptivity itself, which for many people is strongly tied to a Darwinian paradigm.

In the basic Darwinian view, adaptivity is a matter of the continuing survival and reproduction of an organism in changing conditions. The organism passes on its genes to its descendants with minor mutations, some of which are better adapted to new conditions and others of which are not. ‘Natural selection’ then ensures that the better adapted organisms survive and reproduce, whilst the less well adapted die out. This kind of adaptivity , however, is a relatively crude. It takes a very long time for significant adaptation to occur, only operates at the level of entire species or sub-species, and requires the maladapted to perish in the process. Nevertheless, many thinkers still seem to think of this as the only acceptable understanding of adaptivity. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, for instance, expresses a valuable perspective on the long-term value of our ability to adapt to extreme and unpredictable events, or ‘fat tails’ as he calls them. If our perspective is too short-term, and we fail to take these events into account, even if we appear to be well-adapted to a more limited immediate range of conditions, we lose. However, the kind of adaptiveness he has in mind appears to be only that of survival (even if not strictly only of a species). In this he seems to follow a strand of thinking in evolutionary biology that reduces all other forms of adaptation to that one.

However, adaptation is clearly a much more complex concept than that. It is a feature of a system, and systems may operate at different levels where their goals may not be just the survival of the system (practically necessary though that remains), but rather the fulfilment of a variety of needs. As systems evolve greater complexity, their goals also become more complex. Whilst survival is always the grounding condition on which the development of other goals depends, a hierarchy of ‘higher’ goals can develop in dependence on them. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs expresses those adaptive goals for humans, working up from the social adaptations of belonging and esteem to the individual one of what Maslow called ‘self-actualisation’.But how can we understand Maslow’s insights in the context of adaptation? After all, a reductive evolutionary biologist would probably say that all of these needs boil down to survival in the end, and that even self-actualisation is only adaptive because it helps us solve problems or get on with others in ways that help us survive. I don’t agree that that’s the whole story, though, and it has recently occurred to me that talking in terms of a fractal structure may help to explain the relationships between different types of adaptivity. In a fractal structure, the features of a larger system are reproduced (potentially infinitely) at smaller and smaller scales, the Mandelbrot Set (pictured) being an example of these relationships mathematically turned into an image.

To think of adaptivity in a fractal way, we’ll need to think of a hierarchy of successively smaller systems (smaller both in time and space) dependent on the larger one, but in which the same basic pattern of conditions operates. Exactly how you divide up levels of adaptivity may be a matter of debate, but I think we can distinguish at least four levels: biological, cultural, individual and imaginative. In each case there is a means of transmission of certain features that operates only at that level, a specific selective force that depends on the fulfilment of needs in different conditions, and both reinforcing and balancing types of feedback. I’ve suggested what the features of these four levels might be in the table below, though I’m sure this sketch can be refined.

When we get to the ‘higher’, or more distinctively human, forms of adaptivity, it is our use of symbols to create meaning that seems to be the basis of adaptivity, but operating in three different ways. At a cultural or social level, shared symbols and beliefs help societies to adapt, although rigidity in those symbols and beliefs can also become maladaptive. At this level, safety, belonging and respect start to become important in addition to survival. At an individual level, the development of an individual capacity for meaning and belief through neural links allows that individual to meet all their needs, including self-actualisation. Again, however, rigidity of belief can be maladaptive – this time for the individual. Within the individual, and within a shorter time-frame rather than a whole life, there is finally an imaginative level of adaptivity that is created by our ability to use symbols hypothetically and thus simulate possibilities in our minds. This imaginative process boosts our adaptivity as individuals, helping us to adapt far more quickly than we could do by merely waiting for our previous habits to fail us in new conditions. However, once again, maladaptivity for the individual occurs through the reinforcing feedback of imaginative reconstruction in loops of anxiety or obsession.

I think that these ways of understanding adaptivity help us to distinguish the Middle Way clearly from other kinds of adaptivity to a context. The practice of the Middle Way does not consist in just any kind of balancing feedback loop, but rather the development of awareness required for provisionality. If we can examine alternatives hypothetically, we can not only be freed from reinforcing feedback at the imaginative level, but also start to make an impression on the more basic levels. Provisionality applied consistently and courageously can change both long-term individual development and social beliefs, slow and frustrating though that process may seem when we see our societies going through damaging reinforcing feedback loops. Whether we can successfully influence the biological level is much more debatable.

However refined our thinking as individuals, however, we are still subject to the more basic conditioning of the biological level. As we are increasingly discovering through the climate crisis, the very existence of the more complex and refined systems, both social and individual, is under threat if we cannot maintain the basic conditions for our survival as a species.

Pictures: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs by factoryjoe (Wikimedia Commons). Mandelbrot Set picture of unknown origin. Table of levels of adaptivity by the author.

A new review of ‘Thinking in Systems’ by Donella Meadows (reviewed by Robert M. Ellis) is now available on this page. This is a highly recommended book that can help you understand systems theory in a clear, universal form.