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.

Unruly geography

Geography, Middle Way Philosophy,

Since early childhood, I have been fascinated by maps. I used to pore over my father’s old atlases from the 1930’s (where half the world was still pink), and then draw my own fantasy maps – which, as I became a teenager, turned into map-based strategy games drawn on grids of hexagons. Maps were a way of conceptually controlling a world of uncertainty, of creating and defending clear boundaries. In that way, despite their graphical nature, maps can be just another way of absolutizing, and the Middle Way can be a challenge to the assumptions we often make about them. What would a Middle Way geography look like?Off the Map

I have been stimulated to think more about this recently by reading a fascinating book called Off the Map by Alastair Bonnett. Off the Map is an account of a set of places that defy our assumptions about geographical boundaries. There are islands of silt, pumice, ice or rubbish that come and go. There are cities that change identity (such as Leningrad), or are totally deserted by humans (such as Pripyat near Chernobyl). There are no-man’s-lands such as Bir Tawil between the Egyptian and Sudanese borders, or an inaccessible traffic island in Newcastle. There is an enclave within an enclave within an enclave in the ‘Chitmahals’ of an incredibly complex borderland between India and Bangladesh. There’s the monastic republic of Mount Athos in Greece, where no women are allowed. Then there’s the self-declared independent country called Sealand based on an abandoned Second World War gun platform off the coast of Essex, England.

It is tempting to be Romantic about such places, to identify with them as brave redoubts against the bureaucratising imposition of normal geographical expectations. Sealand, for example, was created by a man called Roy Bates, who created himself Prince of his offshore gun platform and refused to pay British taxes. But this example is also clearly one of unsustainable fantasy. Bates’ obsessions were those of negative metaphysics such as the love of freedom for its own sake, merely counter-dependent on the positive metaphysics of the despised normal state and its boundaries. Sealand can be an apt illustration of the perils of relativism.Sealand Ryan Lackey CCA2-0 If you absolutise your own independence you cut yourself lose from the values you relied on up till then. If you just deny your connection with your roots and their founding values and institutions rather than engaging in a critical relationship with them, you can end up in an unsustainable and vulnerable position. Sealand was first invaded at gunpoint, and then later exploited by others selling its passports from abroad at a massive profit.

Nevertheless, it is good to acknowledge many of the denied and forgotten places that Bonnett tells us about, whether they are empty cities in Inner Mongolia, remote Utopian communities in Russia, ‘dogging’ venues by an English lay-by, or children’s dens. The boundaries here are more about what we expect a community to be: populated, conventional, free of ‘private’ sexual activity, and known by adults. I think that provides one set of pointers towards a Middle Way geography. First we need to acknowledge that our ideas about places and boundaries are incomplete, riddled with holes and exceptions, and thus not absolute. But then we also need to acknowledge their provisional value in many cases. By looking a bit more closely, beyond the expectations either of an absolute boundary or of its denial, we find the messy uncertainties of experience once again.

What would that mean in practice for someone living in a more conventional city, town or village? Well, taking our political borders provisionally has implications for how we treat immigration, as I have argued in another blog post about the European refugee crisis. But beyond the political issues, Middle Way geography can also be linked to our attitudes to our own locality. If we treat it ‘mindfully’ (in Ellen Langer’s terms) by being  open to new distinctions in that locality rather than relating to it in terms of fixed categories, even familiar localities will always reveal new features. Here’s a little exercise you can try now: look up at whatever room or other environment you’re in, and just note one new feature about it that you haven’t noted before. There, you are already engaging in Middle Way geography, by challenging whatever positive or negative fixed beliefs you had about that place.

Geography can hardly be neglected in the practice of the Middle Way, because it is a key aspect of human experience. Whether you like geography or not, you have a geography. Just by being an embodied being, you inhabit a place, and you interact with that place on the basis of beliefs about it. That place is then spatially related to lots of other places, to which you also relate in varying degrees. Your thinking about all of these places can be absolutised, or it can be made increasingly adequate to conditions by avoiding such absolutisation. This may just offer an alternative approach to aspects of your beliefs that you would otherwise engage with from different directions, but it is nevertheless a rich one.

Picture of Sealand by Ryan Lackey CCA2.0

Forget karma and carry on

Buddhism, Ethics, Middle Way Philosophy

As a former Buddhist of about 20 years, I still have many Buddhist friends, and one of the most frequent things I disagree with them about (I hope, amicably) is karma. Karma is a complex and tricky subject, that is often misunderstood, so I often find that when I raise objections to it, people who have studied karma and know something about it tend to jump to the conclusion that I’m in one of those categories of misunderstanding. I think otherwise. I recognise (I think) all the common misunderstandings. I recognise a whole set of reasons why some people – Buddhists, Hindus, New Agey types, or whoever – believe that a belief in karma is a good thing, but I think they’re also missing the bigger reasons why it isn’t. Instead, the practice of the Middle Way should, I think, lead us to abandon belief in karma. This is going to be a difficult subject to encapsulate in the length of a blog, but I’m going to have a go.

First, let’s acknowledge and leave behind various misunderstandings of karma. Even in its most traditionalist Indian versions, karma does not mean ‘fate’. Instead, it literally means ‘action’, and is a contraction of ‘karma-vipaka’, the ripening of action. Karma thus means the effects of action, and those effects are only believed to be inevitable once you’ve done the actions. The original significance of karmic doctrines in both Hinduism and Buddhism was thus to help people take responsibility for their actions, avoiding fatalism. It needs to be noted that ‘action’ here includes mental as well as physical actions: even a thought is an action, though often a less significant one than a physical action. The insight to be found in karma doctrine is that our actions, including mere thoughts, do always have effects of some kind. However, karmic doctrine also asserts that these effects return to us in a proportionate way.Good_karma_for_all

Another confusion around karma lies between retrospective and prospective ways of looking at it. Retrospective karma is when you notice a condition (e.g. a disability) and attribute it to an action in the past (e.g. you must have done something bad in the past to get that disability). The belief in retrospective karma involves the assumption that there are no other kinds of conditions at work (other than karma), such as genetics, to produce something like a disability. This kind of belief in karma – though still common – is pretty crass. However, when I suggest that belief in karma is unhelpful, I’m not only talking about retrospective karma. The prospective view of karma, where you assume that your actions will always lead to a proportionate result for you (even when you don’t know for sure which of the conditions that affect you are due to past karma) raises quite enough problems without needing to get into the retrospective version.

In the most common Hindu view of karma, an atman, or eternal self, receives the karmic effects of your past deeds. However, in Buddhism, belief in karma is combined with the anatman or ‘no-self’ doctrine (which is often interpreted as denial of a continuous self, but may more subtly be seen as agnosticism about it). If there is no self, though, who deserves the effects of past deeds? The person who receives the karmic effect is different from the person who performs the action, and thus the idea that karma has any moral significance, or that the person who receives the effect ‘deserves’ it, falls apart. A Buddhist text called the Questions of King Milinda tries to explain this by analogy to a mango and a mango tree: the person who planted the mango, it is argued, deserves the fruits of the ensuing mango tree, even though the mango is different from the tree. But what if someone else owned the land, a third watered and fertilised the young mango tree, and a fourth made the effort to pick the fruit? At best, then, the person who planted the mango might claim a small share! After many years of thinking about this problem, I can’t see this juxtaposition of Buddhist doctrines as anything other than thoroughly contradictory. What’s more, the contradiction is not somehow indicative of deeper wisdom – it’s more likely just an ineffectual attempt to patch up the relationship between incompatible beliefs in which people had developed vested interests.

The most basic problem with karma is that it requires a perfect system of just desert. Even if you don’t know when it is coming or how, karma requires that your action today will create corresponding effects in the future. But given that we are (as the Buddhist ‘no-self’ doctrine suggests) always changing, there is no way that we could perfectly ‘deserve’ those effects of actions done by someone different in the past. We can experience all sorts of effects of previous actions, yes, but the extent to which we benefit or suffer from them is unclear and inexact. If you say something unkind to Mr Smith today, he may get his own back tomorrow. If you fill in your tax return dishonestly, you may be tortured by pangs of conscience, and the revenue may catch up with you in future. Very often, indeed, people underestimate these kinds of moral effects. But the belief that they must be inevitable and morally proportionate is just dogma: experience gives us no grounds to assert such a thing.

Of course, it is the problem of what happens to karma that hasn’t obviously had its effects within a given person’s life that leads to the doctrine of rebirth. If your karma hasn’t paid you back in this life, the argument goes, then it will do so in another. Here we very clearly go beyond anything that can be supported through experience, and into the realm of speculation and dogma. I’m not going to go further into the question of rebirth here, because without karma, there is no particular reason to take it seriously. Karma is the more basic issue, and rebirth is just a big ad hoc defence of karma in the face of just one of the many ways the doctrine is inconsistent with experience.

One of the insights related to karma, especially in the Buddhist tradition, concerns the ways in which our states of mind contribute to its workings. Indeed, on some accounts (such as that of the Yogachara school), karma is entirely a matter of stored mental effects, and the reason we experience karmic effects of our previous actions is that our deeper minds themselves store and channel those effects. Could the supposed perfection of karmic effects be explained by their mental nature? Well, neuroscience makes clear the likelihood that any given judgement can contribute to the entrenchment of a mental habit. For example, if we get into the habit of drinking too much alcohol, the prospect of alcohol creates a feedback loop in the brain, in which synaptic tracks get increasingly more entrenched. We both develop a mental model in which alcohol will meet our needs, and reward the fulfilment of that model through the dopamine hits we get from receiving it. Is the belief in karma really an ancient insight into the way our brains work?

Well, no, because there’s a big difference between an entrenched habit and an inevitable effect. The significance of an entrenched synaptic track in the brain is that it makes it much more difficult to act differently. We have to exert effort, and use more glucose, to do something different like drinking an orange juice. However, there’s nothing inevitable about the effects of that track. We could conceivably just carry on making that effort to drink orange juice instead of alcohol, and the appeal of alcohol may very gradually fade as new alternative tracks are made. The habit may well lead to me feeling the ‘karmic effect’ of the negative effects of alcohol-craving in one way or another in the future, but if we are to take responsibility for our actions we also need to accept that it may not. Uncertainty is a much more basic condition than habit and its effects, meaning that we have no justification for absolutising bad habits into karmic laws.

Perhaps recognising some of these problems, another tack that advocates of karma sometimes take is to weaken it. “Karma isn’t an iron law” they say, “Karma just means actions having consequences.” By this, I presume they mean that it is useful for people to recognise and face up to the consequences of their actions, and indeed that those consequences may well be more far reaching and profound than they recognise. If that’s what they mean, then I thoroughly agree. But why call it karma, and thus in the process associate it with what has traditionally been seen very clearly as an ‘iron law’?

OK, they can define the term ‘karma’ in any way that they wish, and the arguments for doing so, in the end, are pragmatic ones. But I’ve yet to hear a good pragmatic argument for calling the ordinary, observable effects of our actions ‘karma’, and I can offer some strong pragmatic arguments for not doing so. The main one of these is that belief in karma is overwhelmingly understood, in both Buddhist and Hindu traditions, as a purely conceptual metaphysical belief about perfect payback, and that recognising the effects of our actions needs to be raw and experiential, not purely conceptual. I learn about the effects of alcohol through raw, embodied experience, not through deduction from some absolute belief about the effects of all actions. Indeed, associating it with an absolute belief is just likely to be a distraction at best, and more likely an exercise in ad hoc defense of tradition. The consequences of our actions are overwhelmingly particular, not general. The uncertainties of that realm of particular experience are basic to it. So the belief in karma tackles the matter from the wrong end of the spectrum: encouraging us, not to reflect on our experience and generalise about it in ways that can be applied to other situations, but to impose absolute top-down assumptions on it.

On not saying Amen to Star Wars

Film, Religion, spirituality

The three major cinema chains that control 80% of UK cinemas recently rejected an advert that consists of a 60 second montage of the Lord’s Prayer, spoken by a variety of different people in different situations and prepared by the Church of England (see news report). The advert was set to go out before screenings of the new Star Wars film, and the church saw it as a way of reaching the wide audiences that would come to see this film before Christmas. The reason given by the cinema companies is that they do not accept any political or religious advertising, for such advertising might be offensive to some customers. The 60 second clip, however, has a simple message “Prayer is for everybody”, and (beyond what may be implied by that statement) does not advertise any particular religious view. You can see the advert here.

I can hear the Christians shouting “What’s offensive about this?” and the secularists shouting “Quite right too. We don’t want religious propaganda on our cinema screens”. But let’s try to unpick the likely assumptions of both sides a little. As usual, absolutisations on both sides tend to obscure the issues.

The Christians may find the Lord’s Prayer so familiar and culturally routine that they may not notice how absolute its language is. It asserts the existence of God in heaven. It embeds the metaphor of God as father that helps to entrench patriarchy. It asks God to exert his power and will over the earth in a way that could leave us passive or with a sense of false certainty about everything being taken care of for us. It asks God to ‘deliver us from evil’ as though to obscure all the tsunamis, cancer victims and murders in his name that he seems to have done nothing about, despite his supposed omnipotence. It also completes the fantasy by affirming belief in the kingdom, often interpreted as an ideal state in the future where God will have fixed everything. Although there are some lines in the prayer, such as those urging us to forgive others, that seem to have a helpful integrative orientation, the Lord’s Prayer taken just as a set of words is not really that inoffensive. It is indeed religious propaganda for unhelpful absolute beliefs that – at least as they are most commonly understood – will not actually help anyone to overcome conflict or address conditions better. On the contrary they may make it worse.

But then, watch the video again, this time focusing not on the words but on the people. The atmosphere of the whole carefully constructed video is extremely positive and reassuring. All the different people, in their diverse situations, are mindful and focused, taking a moment of reflectiveness in the middle of their day. That moment of reflectiveness is powerful. But then imagine all the same scenes with slightly different words. Would the effect be very different? Perhaps for some people the reassurance of the time-worn words, apparently almost meaningless but vaguely comforting, would be lost. But much of the power of that moment of recollection would remain. So most of it is not intrinsically dependent on the Lord’s Prayer itself.

The movement between diverse people all similarly focused also creates a strong sense of human solidarity that I find inspiring, even uplifting. Again though, it is not the words that intrinsically create that sense of solidarity. Religion has developed in such a way that layers of ritual affirming human solidarity are overlaid on a core of beliefs that tend to undermine that solidarity. To see how they might undermine it too, imagine the reactions that would be provoked by singing the Lord’s Prayer in a mosque, or at a lecture given by Richard Dawkins.

So, to understand what the secularists may also be missing, think about the disjunction between the absolute beliefs affirmed by the Lord’s Prayer and the positive meaning of the prayer for millions of Christians, as it is depicted on the video. Those Christians will probably be bewildered if you tell them that their prayer of peace is also productive of conflict. That’s really not what it means to them. Nevertheless, we can all integrate our interpretations of the meaning of the Lord’s Prayer by acknowledging the wide range of things it can mean, and that those meanings depend on the various bodies of the people who experience it, rather than the prayer having a “real” meaning (whether that meaning is good or bad) independent of those people and their bodies. This mistake in what we take meaning to be seems to be at the heart of the mutual incomprehension that arises on topics like this.

Another thing that secularists often neglect to recognise is that absolutisation is not at all the sole preserve of religion. Let’s go back to the Star Wars showing in the cinema. Is the Lord’s Prayer advert uniquely ‘offensive’ because it contains absolutisations (as well as conveying an experience of human reflectiveness and solidarity)? Well, if it’s offensive, it’s certainly not uniquely offensive. The Lord’s Prayer advert, if it had been shown, would probably have been preceded and followed by other adverts that encouraged people to absolutise beliefs such as that they would be uniquely attractive is they use a particular perfume, or absolutely powerful if they drive a particular car.  Belief in the value of hedonism, that value comes only from pleasure, could also be seen as reinforced by nearly every commercial advert. But these kinds of consumerist absolutisations generally pass without critical comment.Clip from Lords Prayer advert

Then there’s the film itself that would follow. Not being a Star Wars devotee, I’m not familiar with the details of the religious elements of Star Wars, but I gather that they involve a certain amount of cod Zen mixed in with the providentialism of ‘May the Force be with you’. Probably a good deal vaguer than the Lord’s Prayer, but it doesn’t sound as though it’s free of absolutisations. Those absolutisations will be far more forcefully propagandised by a lengthy film with a narrative, characters etc than they would have been by the Lord’s Prayer advert. Indeed it seems likely that by the end of the film 98% of the audience would have completely forgotten about the Lord’s Prayer, swept away by the power of fantasy. Again, the meaning of this for the people who watch it is probably far more important than the effect it will actually have on their beliefs, but that doesn’t mean that no dubious beliefs are being promoted.

So, were the cinemas right to refuse to screen the Lord’s Prayer advert on the grounds that some people might find it offensive? No. I disagree with the absolutisations in the Lord’s Prayer, but let’s also understand the role of these in context. If we start trying to control the expression of absolutisations in the public sphere in any way, let’s at least try to do so consistently, rather than picking on religious ones as offensive when commercial ones are apparently not so. In its context, too, the Lord’s Prayer advert would have functioned mainly as a moment of calm, reflectiveness and solidarity in the midst of a storm of over-stimulation, hedonism, violent combat and archetypal idealisation. Let’s have more of those moments of calm and solidarity. If they could come without absolutisations, that would be preferable, but let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the good.

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