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.

Sacred relics

Middle Way Philosophy, Religion,

The other day I found a piece of the Berlin Wall: a rough shard of concrete about 3cm x 1 cm, largely grey apart from red on one side, and gift-wrapped in cellophane with a ribbon. It was given to me by a student from Berlin in 1990 (when I was teaching English as a foreign language to German students). When I re-discovered this piece, though, I began to wonder why this otherwise insignificant piece of concrete had been preserved, what it ‘meant’, and why we preserve such things. I began to realise that what I held in my hand was a sacred relic: along with the many splinters from the true cross, phials of the Virgin’s milk, bones of saints and teeth of the Buddha preserved around the world.

Those of a naturalistic (or perhaps just a Protestant) leaning tend to sneer at sacred relics on the grounds that they are fraudulent. It is most unlikely, and indeed can probably be proved by further investigation (carbon dating etc.) that most of the sacred relics in the world are not literally what they claim to be. If one thinks of religion in terms of belief that is a matter of concern, but from the standpoint of meaning prior to belief it matters little. I don’t want to defend fraudulent claims about medieval relics, but at the same time the significance of those relics to religious practitioners probably has little to do with their material origins. Instead they are objects invested with a certain symbolic significance: fetishes, idols, charms, souvenirs, mementos.

I have rather less reason to doubt that my shard of the Berlin Wall is ‘authentic’ – but if it Berlin Wall hole Jurek Durczakwasn’t, this would really have no impact on its significance. Its value as a symbolic object depends only on its connection with the destruction of the Berlin Wall. If one was looking for an event to poignantly symbolise the Middle Way and integration, the destruction of the Berlin Wall might well be it. Entrenched ideologies swept away and false divisions removed by the autonomous actions of the people – what better symbol of Migglism is there than that? It’s all the more poignant as a symbol of the Middle Way because most of the people destroying the Berlin Wall probably didn’t think of it explicitly in that way – but nevertheless they felt the joy of integration and recognised the widened horizons that occur when dogmas are removed.

The significance of the relic, then (whether medieval or modern, ‘religious’ or ‘secular’) comes not from its physical origins but from the projections we put on it. Those projections can themselves often become stuck. I think this is what the monotheistic religions mean by ‘idolatry’ (in Islam, where it’s a very important concept, the term is shirk). If you start to think that the object, rather than just reminding you of some other significant event, concept or person, in some way gives you a shortcut to the fulfilment or integration you would get directly from them, then you are starting to fetishise or idolise the object. That means that you are giving it absolute qualities that it cannot possess. If I were to set up a Migglist shrine giving pride of place to my shard of the Berlin Wall, and expecting veneration of the shard to provide the fulfilment that the destruction of the Berlin Wall (or its equivalents in my life) actually does, then I would have turned my previous mere appreciation of the meaning of the shard into a set of obstructive metaphysical beliefs about it. This would be failing to appreciate why it does have significance to me – that is, as something that relates to my bodily experience rather than a copy of the thing-out-there.

How do we know when we have crossed that line of absolutising a mere reminder? Well, one test might well be whether we can treat the mere reminder as such – changing it or even destroying it in the full appreciation that by doing so we do not change what it symbolises. There’s a well known story about a Zen monk burning Buddha images to keep warm. If you have a shrine of objects you venerate – whether they are Buddhas, family photos, souvenirs or special books – could you happily destroy those objects? Could I take the shard of concrete that I believe to be from the Berlin Wall, throw it away and substitute another shard of concrete? Could the Catholics who venerate a splinter from the True Cross substitute another splinter from a handy nearby fence? Destroying our idols sounds to me like quite a therapeutic exercise, provided you do have a strong sense of the continuing value of what the object symbolises apart from the object.

The problem with this approach is that it can easily get confused with the long history of iconoclasm (destruction of icons) in Christianity and Islam. The original iconoclasts smashed up the icons in Byzantine churches, and the Islamic tradition followed by destroying Christian, Hindu and Buddhist ‘idols’, which they regarded as false gods interceding in our relationship to the true God. To this day you won’t see any pictures of people or animals in a mosque – only perhaps calligraphy or abstract ornamentation based on vegetation. I think the trouble with this is that in the place of fetishized objects or pictures Muslims have substituted words – the words of the Qur’an which were believed to be God’s words. Although they seem to have understood the dangers of absolutising objects or pictures, those dangers lie in the beliefs we have about them, not in the objects themselves or even their significance to us, and it is no advance to substitute other more abstract absolute beliefs for absolute beliefs about objects.

So, my suggestion is that we need to recognise that we all have sacred relics, in the sense of objects to which we attach special significance. The use of terms like ‘mantelpiece’ rather than ‘shrine’ for the places we keep these objects does not stop them being sacred or having a religious dimension. We can enjoy and celebrate that special significance – whether in art, ritual, reflection or conversation – without absolutising those objects or having metaphysical beliefs about them. If we are to stay with the meaning of those objects and enjoy them positively, a recognition and exploration of the distinction between meaning and belief seems crucial, as does a critical sense of when we might be investing our sacred relics with properties they cannot possess.

 

Picture: Hole in the Berlin Wall by Jurek Durczak – CCA 2.0

Website recovery

Uncategorized

This website has been entirely down, or only partially functional, for the past 5 days. This is due to a virus infection which took some time to sort out. I had to delete the website and reconstruct it from back-up, and then once it was up again there turned out to be further technical issues. These are now resolved, so the website is back! Please make full use of it, and let me know if you do encounter any further technical issues.

The Trouble with Economics

Current Affairs, Economics, Education

If you were to ask which group of academics had the most direct influence over the state and destiny of our society, a good bet would be those of economics. They mould the thinking of the economics graduates of tomorrow, who go on to advise, possibly even run, banks, businesses, governments and international institutions. Yet this same group of academics is by all accounts the most dogmatic of them all, with academic power and influence across the globe staying exclusively with one group of thought (the neo-classical), who monopolise the most prestigious economics journals, the appointments for academic posts, and the shape of economics syllabuses in universities. The ideas of these people have massive power over the world, and yet the inadequacy of their ideas becomes immediately obvious to anyone who looks out beyond the narrow assumptions of their mathematical models. This is a disastrous example of the power of the self-justifying left hemisphere in action.

I have become increasingly aware of this recently when writing about economics as (a small) part of my new book, when I discovered that there is a growing protest movement amongst economics students protesting against the narrowness of the teaching they receive. My perception of the disastrous impact of academic economics has been reinforced by listening to an excellent radio programme from BBC Radio 4, in which Aditya Chakrabortty provides widespread evidence both of the narrowness and its consequences. I highly recommend this programme, which is linked here (on BBC iplayer, which means it will only be available for 30 days and only within the UK). It’s 38 minutes long but well worth that expenditure of time. The people interviewed by Chakrabortty admitting the huge inadequacies of academic economics include a big cheese from the Bank of England, billionaire George Soros (who said he made his fortune by ignoring his economics training) and some eminent (but still marginalised) economists such as Robert Skidelsky and Ha-Joon Chang, as well as a great many frustrated students from around the globe.Teaching economics after the crash

The situation in economics sounds very similar to the one I encountered as a postgraduate student in philosophy: the ascendency of a narrow view of the subject is maintained by a positive feedback loop. Only the people with the mainstream assumptions get published in the most prestigious journals. Only the people who publish in those journals stand any chance in the massive competition for academic jobs. Once they get there, those people have sunk costs and vested interests that make them very slow to change anything, and their ability to support the beliefs of the powerful ensures that they are never seriously challenged. They just mould the next generation and the cycle continues.

In evolutionary terms, this would involve selection for narrow-mindedness and fragility, where people who flourish in certain very restricted conditions but take no account of wider uncertainties continue to rule – until they bring the whole of their society down with them. The only difference between philosophy and economics in this respect is that the effects of philosophy on society are much slower and more long-term than those of economics, whereas people can see the defects of narrow economic thinking clearly and amply demonstrated in the crash of 2008.

In the chapter on economics in my forthcoming book, I identify five common and influential dogmas in economics – all dogmas that can be related to wider ones beyond economics. These are:

  1. Rational choice theory, which assumes that a unified self will make consistent consumption choices
  2. Perfect information, which assumes that people know what is happening in the markets they are participating in
  3. Cosmic justice in a free market: i.e. Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’, which ensures that the narrow choices of individuals will be transformed by the power of the market into general good by helping to create wealth
  4. The growth model, which assumes infinite resources can be used for unending growth (or that growth can somehow be decoupled from a lack of new resources)
  5. Profit maximisation, which assumes that the best strategy for a company is always to maximise profit, whilst other motives (e.g. those of fair trade) simply distort the functioning of the market

It is not as though these assumptions have no challenges in the wider world. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for demolishing rational choice theory. The Invisible Hand has long been questioned by left-wingers, whilst the growth model has long been questioned by Greens, and is cogently deconstructed by green economist Tim Jackson. The movement for corporate social and environmental responsibility, including the fairtrade movement, also offers a challenge to profit maximisation. Above all, Nassim Nicholas Taleb provides a strong challenge to the over-certainties of economics (see my review of his book Antifragile). There are also plenty of alternative models being developed (such as Tim Jackson’s account of prosperity without growth), so the criticism is not merely destructive. But all this criticism from the voices of experience seems to make little or no impression on the self-sufficient, self-reinforcing dogmatic bubble of the core academic discipline.

Of the five dogmas above, the one that concerns me most is the fourth. The growth model appears to be analogous to a car that is constantly accelerating because it is being chased by a police car of debt, speeding along behind it. But it is only a matter of time before the car crashes, runs out of petrol, or runs out of road, at which point the debt police car will also catch up with it. In this respect it just provides a particularly urgent and striking model of the dangers of metaphysical dogma. All dogmas, in some ways, speed up to try to preserve themselves, pursued by police cars of wider conditions, and then they crash. But it seems, at present, as though the economists will do for us long before the other dogmatists get close to doing so.

Robert M Ellis will be giving introductory talks on Middle Way Philosophy in Manchester UK (13th Feb 2015) and London (13th March). See this page for more details.