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.

What is evil?

Myth, Psychology, Religion, ,

This is a re-blog (with a few minor improvements) of a post on my old Middle Way Philosophy blog in September 2012.

Let’s start with a compilation of evil laughs. You’ll probably only need to watch the first minute or so to get the point. What I’d like you to note is certain features of what we imagine to be evil. Note the falseness, the association with a separate universe constructed in one’s own mind, the alienation from others, and the group mentality. All of these are part of our experience of ‘evil’ – but they are not an indication of a supernatural force. Rather they are the features of metaphysics: of fixed beliefs and goals in a super-dominant left brain.

Some people see evil as a supernatural force, whilst others deny its existence or seek to ignore it. I want to avoid either of these approaches and to account for evil, with all its power, in human experience. Just as God can be supremely meaningful without being an object of belief so can evil. The meaning and seriousness of evil seems to be undermined and trivialised in modern culture (illustrated most strongly by the slang use of the terms ‘wicked’ and ‘evil’ to mean conventionally good), but at the same time it is easy to see why this has happened. It demands an absurd level of fraught anxiety to regard ordinary human desire as the work of Satan, when our experience of desire is that it is largely both unavoidable and – up to a point – beneficial. If we have let go of that anxiety and accepted our desires as human, then that is a starting point, but we then need to start taking seriously the need for moral awareness and moral effort. We can only do that with an awareness of what we are avoiding – of ‘evil’ in a broad sense, neither supernatural nor naturalised into nothing.

So what is evil, if it is not Satan outside us, or human desires within us? My thesis is that evil is not a person or a set of feelings or desires, but a type of belief: that is, metaphysics. The integration model explains how we do not have ‘good’ desires and ‘evil’ desires, but rather desires that can be more or less effective as they get more or less integrated. Desires that I may experience as ‘evil’ (say, the desire to be insulting in an argument) are just unintegrated: they are in conflict with my other desires. However, if I then ask what prevents the integration of ‘evil’ (i.e. currently rejected) desires with ‘good’ (i.e. currently accepted) desires, the answer is fixed beliefs. Those beliefs may, on the surface, be about ‘good’ or ‘evil’, but they rigidify and simplify what I understand as good so I can idealise and hold onto it regardless of challenges, and rigidify and simplify what I understand as evil so that I can reject it, regardless of what it may have to tell me. My thesis is that such rigidification tends to occur around metaphysical beliefs – i.e. ones that cannot be incrementally addressed in experience but merely asserted or denied.

So, what is evil, in the broader and more helpful sense, includes metaphysical beliefs about good as well as metaphysical beliefs about evil – along with other metaphysical beliefs such as those about self, fate, freewill, God or nature. It may run against the mental habits of a lifetime to start thinking about the belief in an ultimate good as evil: but we only have to consider the amount of alienation and conflict created by sincerely held ideas of ultimate good to begin to appreciate why this is so. This doesn’t imply that those who hold such beliefs are ‘evil’ or even that they are mainly motivated by evil: only that the impact of such metaphysical beliefs on them is evil, within the context of wider moral development gained by experience. Great saints and religious leaders with strong metaphysical beliefs may often have had a largely good impact – but my thesis is that they were handicapped, not aided, by those beliefs. Their moral objectivity came not from those beliefs, but from the degree of integration created by the other conditions working in their lives, often including the meaningfulness of the symbols (such as God) that they also had metaphysical beliefs about. Similarly, great figures widely regarded as evil (such as Hitler) had a variety of conditions working on them. They were not evil as people, but their rigid metaphysical beliefs dominated their lives to such an extent that their actions strike others as evil. In the case of Hitler it is not only Nazi ideology, but also his beliefs about himself and about the destiny of himself and the Germans, that could be identified as the metaphysical source of this evil.Devil_Goat

But what does this have to do with Satan or with evil as traditionally conceived? The picture here, in Jungian terminology, is a picture of the Shadow: the rejected energies in ourselves that we project outwards onto Dark Lords, villains, evil spirits, unfaithful spouses, bad bosses, evil capitalists etc. The features we normally give to ‘evil’ are associated with narrow left-brain dominance rather than with integration: empire-building, scheming, ruthlessness, and false emotion (as in the evil laughs above). Psychologically, then, it appears that what evil means to us is unintegrated desire.

We allow evil itself to dominate, however, if we project that unintegrated desire outwards and treat people or things as themselves evil. An appreciation of complexity, or of humanity, is an antidote to this. We also allow evil to dominate if we even treat our desires themselves as evil – for they are part of us. Evil instead works primarily at the level of belief. It is the belief in the ultimate truth and completeness of his schemes, and the ultimate justification of his ruthlessness through the idealisation of current egoistic desires, that makes the Dark Lord evil.

 

Devil picture by Rex Diablo (Wikimedia Commons). Picture can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons licence if attributed

Critical Thinking 14: The Principle of Charity

Critical Thinking, ,

The Critical Thinking series has taken a bit of a break recently, but it will continue, perhaps a bit less frequently than before. This time I’m going to deal with a principle of interpretation that’s very helpful for Critical Thinking, though it’s not ‘critical’ in the narrower sense of making a negative point. Instead it suggests a charitable (i.e. loving) response to ambiguity.

Everything we hear, see or read is ambiguous or vague to some degree, and it is an implication of embodied meaning that there will be no precise fit between our words and what we assume is represented by them. Instead we have a physical experience of the meaning of a word that we may associate with a much more definite representation. So, for example if  my partner says “the washing up hasn’t been done*” , I will experience that as a whole physical experience, not just as a disembodied neutral statement of the situation. Any emotions I may have, for example of guilt, will form part of the interpretation. She may not intend to be accusatory at all, but I may nevertheless respond “But I’ve been too busy today!” on the assumption that she meant to accuse me of not doing something I feel I should have done.

The following video gives some good examples of ambiguous situations that could be interpreted in this kind of way. It also mentions the Fundamental Attribution Error, which is the cognitive bias labelling our tendency to assume that other people’s negative actions are their responsibility rather than the effect of circumstances.

The Principle of Charity is that we should interpret ambiguous claims or ambiguous evidence in the most positive way possible in the way they refer to the people concerned. I take this to include oneself, so it involves not only avoiding ‘jumping to conclusions’ about others, but also about what they are saying about me.

This practice is made more complicated by the usual issue that there is a balance of judgement involved (the Middle Way, of course). For the Principle of Charity cannot be practised absolutely. All statements are ambiguous to some degree, and  if we always interpreted them in the most positive possible way, even when they were clearly negative in their implication, we would be living in a sort of positive-thinking cloud-cuckoo land. Some situations clearly demand that we make or face up to criticisms or allegations, which have to be made even though they may possibly be wrong.

Nevertheless, the Principle of Charity may help us to locate the Middle Way, as being some way off from speculative accusations of any kind. This is a very demanding practice, and one I have a long way to go with myself – so I’m happy to have lapses pointed out to me. For example, I must confess that if someone doesn’t answer an email I still sometimes jump to the conclusion that their silence is deliberate, despite years of experience of the whole host of other reasons why people don’t answer emails. There’s nothing quite so ambiguous as non-communication, and it’s incredibly easy to read all sorts of speculative stuff into it.

A prior dislike of someone or something (especially in the sphere of politics) may also prime us to jump to the conclusion that an ambiguous, multiply-caused event is their fault. Here’s an example from the Guardian journalist Suzanne Moore:

Those people who are surprised that David Cameron wants to take away housing benefit from the under-25s have not been paying attention at the back. From tuition fees to workfare to benefit cuts to young parents, to careers stitched up by free internships and temporary contracts, a clear ideological and electoral decision has been made. These young people don’t vote, they don’t pay much tax, and they are superfluous to a Tory win. It is older people who vote.

Moore here observes that many recent policy changes are especially disadvantageous to younger people. She also notices that younger people on average vote less. She then jumps to the conclusion, without sufficient justification, that government policies must be motivated by a deliberate policy of favouring older people because it is electorally advantageous to the Conservatives.

Yes, that’s right – even politicians in government need the Principle of Charity! In fact, I’d suggest that politicians in government especially need it. You may be in power, but if everyone assumes the worst of you regardless of the evidence, you’re likely to end up no longer caring about the justification of your actions, as they’ll be met by public cynicism whatever you do. That’s a bad position to be in when your actions really do matter for a lot of other people.

Exercise: The Principle of Charity and Humour

Here is a video about a controversy over jokey remarks about Mexicans made on the BBC’s Top Gear programme. How do you think the Principle of Charity should be applied to this episode?

Link to other Critical Thinking blog posts

 

*For American readers, this means that the dishes haven’t been washed!

Middle Way Thinkers 2: Sangharakshita

Great Thinkers, Middle Way Philosophy, Religion, ,

Sangharakshita is the founder of the Triratna Buddhist Community, previously known as the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order or FWBO. Now well into his eighties, he still lives quietly at the new rural Triratna centre called Adhisthana in Herefordshire, in the west of England. As a former member of the Triratna Order, I was once officially one of Sangharakshita’s disciples (though I was always rather uncomfortable with this implication of Order membership). Both before and after leaving the Order, I have been critical both of aspects of Sangharakshita’s teachings and of his status in a personality cult in Triratna. When you have been part of a religious group that you need to distance yourself from, the stakes are high, and there is always a danger of polarisation – people only perceiving a rejection when one attempts a balanced approach. But Sangharakshita is also an important and often inspiring thinker and practitioner in relation to the Middle Way, and I would like to give full recognition to that. I would also like to encourage others to engage positively with his writings whilst maintaining a critical perspective, despite the fact that Triratna does not sufficiently encourage such a critical perspective. sangharakshita

Balanced appraisals of Sangharakshita’s thought are rare. Though you might get some of his disciples to admit to minor criticisms, their public utterances about him are usually characterised by gushy gratitude and uncritical intellectual idealisation. On the other hand, he is largely ignored both by the academic world and by other kinds of Buddhists, many of whom could learn from his ideas, but who are often put off by the cultishness that surrounds him. His writings are voluminous, unsystematic and varied in style (because many are compiled from oral transcriptions, and these are very different from the books he has composed directly), and probably the best overview available is by his disciple Subhuti, Sangharakshita: A new voice in the Buddhist Tradition (Windhorse). One day I hope to write a critical study of Sangharakshita’s ideas of a type that does not yet exist: one that tries to sort the wheat from the chaff.  In a blog post, for the moment, I will only be able to say a little about some of the most important of his ideas as they relate to the Middle Way.

First, it must be said that Sangharakshita is probably the Buddhist teacher who has taken the most notice of the Middle Way. It is clear that he has a sense of its importance, and he does often apply it in his judgements about ethical and other matters. For example, he writes:  At every stage of the spiritual life we are faced by the necessity of making a choice between either of two opposites, on the one hand, and the mean which reconciles the opposition by transcending it, on the other (A Survey of Buddhism, p.160). That’s probably the reason why, in practice, the Middle Way is often used as a basis of judgement in Triratna: even when the theory surrounding it is so inadequate, people still have a sense of the Middle Way as they encounter it directly in experience and spiritual practice.

However, I say that his theory of the Middle Way is inadequate, as his approach (in common with that of many other Buddhists, it must be said) is to regard the Middle Way as  description of a metaphysical truth rather as a method by which to make judgements in our experience. He sees the Middle Way as having metaphysical, ethical and psychological modes, but his account of the ethics and the psychology is deduced from the metaphysics he assumes. As a result he ends up caricaturing the extremes to be avoided in a way that is quite inadequate to our experience of the complexity of our beliefs and the way they relate to psychological states. He writes: “The belief that behind the bitter-sweet of human life yawn only the all-devouring jaws of a gigantic Nothingness will inevitably reduce man to his body and his body to his sensations; pleasure will be set up as the whole object of human endeavour, self-indulgence lauded to the skies, abstinence contemned, and the voluptuary honoured as the best and wisest of mankind.” If, on the other hand, one believes in an Absolute Being such as God, “the object of the spiritual life will be held to consist in effecting a complete dissociation between spirit and matter, the real and the unreal, God and the world, the temporal and the eternal; whence follows self-mortification in its extremest and most repulsive forms” (Survey pp.162-3).

If the Middle Way is to be of any use to us, it cannot merely consist in such a caricature of the materialist, the Marxist, the Christian etc, with the automatic assumption that, because of traditional statements about the Middle Way found in traditional Buddhist texts, these people must either be totally self-indulgent or self-mortifying. Experience suggests rather that the relationships between metaphysical beliefs and psychological states are far more complex than this. There are self-mortifying Marxists and self-indulgent Christians, for example. The Middle Way potentially offers far more insights than this caricature of it suggests, but it will only yield them with an approach that avoids metaphysical assumptions about the Middle Way itself, and takes experience rather than obscure dogma as the basis of judgement about how beliefs relate to psychological states.

It is this metaphysical reading (of a principle that needs to start with avoidance of metaphysics) that I assume leads Sangharakshita to his view that the most basic principal of Buddhism is conditioned co-production (or dependent origination) – a claim about how things are rather than a method of investigation. So despite his emphasis on the Middle Way in some respects, Sangharakshita’s approach merely promotes confusion about it in other respects, because the Middle Way as an experiential method gets constantly confused with a ‘truth’ that conflicts with that method. This confusion can only have a negative practical effect when people try to put the Middle Way into operation.

However, there are many other useful ideas and attitudes that I owe to Sangharakshita. One is his universalism – not in the shallow sense that all views are equally good, but in his conviction that all kinds of traditions can be mined for insights that support and inspire the practice of the Middle Way. For example, he is a lover of Renaissance art and of William Blake, as well as attempting to find common insights in all the schools of Buddhism and even in some aspects of other religions.

Sangharakshita has also made considerable use of Jung’s thought and related it to the insights of Buddhism. He makes use of the concept of integration and a psychological explanation of what is involved in spiritual development. He also makes excellent and stimulating use of Jungian archetypes in his discussion of the deeper significance of Buddhist scripture and symbol and its significance. As a result, Triratna Buddhists tend to make widespread use of archetypal interpretations of religious forms.

Sangharakshita also points out the dogmatic nature of group thinking, and recognises a Middle Way between groupishness and individualism. This is what has led me into the conclusion that the function of metaphysical belief is the maintenance of group loyalty. Sangharakshita instead extols what he calls ‘the true individual’. In effect this seems to mean a person who follows the Middle Way in developing an autonomous judgement, neither prematurely accepting nor rejecting the group and the beliefs that give it identity.

Sangharakshita is also undoubtedly inspiring as a practitioner, who has tried to combine an intellectual articulation of Buddhist insights together with huge commitment to its practice. Though it is often rather difficult to separate genuine experience from hagiography in the accounts leading disciples give of his practical acuity, it is obvious that he has engaged deeply and seriously with both meditative and ethical practice. His ethical writings and guidance have given a particular emphasis to the practice of friendship that seems to have been particularly helpful in the development of Triratna, and marked it out from other Buddhist groups.

This commitment to the unity of theory and practice just by itself is both inspiring and rare, particularly when one considers that the theory Sangharakshita has developed is what he has thought out for himself rather than merely adopted uncritically from tradition. I only wish that Sangharakshita’s disciples would emulate their teacher more in this respect, by treating Sangharakshita’s own thinking with the critical attention that a full respect for it merits, rather than treating his words and writings as a new basis of uncritical authority. To follow Sangharakshita, surely, one should try to do what he did, which was to critically appraise the traditions that he found in his context, and, where necessary, start afresh to develop new approaches that better capture the insights one finds in past work. To turn Sangharakshita into a guru, as even he at times has suggested is not appropriate, seems to me like a betrayal of the best that can be found in his legacy.

Related pages

The Buddha and the Middle Way

The Buddha and the Middle Way Audio

The Middle Way in Buddhism Books

 

 

Life and death

Middle Way Philosophy, Religion, ,

I am sometimes asked whether Middle Way Philosophy offers a meaning of life, and what it has to say about death. I have often been hesitant in trying to offer perspectives on these kinds of questions, because there is such a long tradition of unhelpful metaphysical speculation about them. However, I think the Middle Way can be applied helpfully here, if only to challenge that tradition of speculation and point us back to experience. This post is the final chapter of my new introductory book, Migglism, which should finally be published within a week or so now. I have added it to the book recently in response to a useful suggestion from Mike Fedorski.

If we are to avoid metaphysics, there can be no meaning to life as a whole beyond the meaning that we experience. That may sound like a familiar truism – that the meaning of life is just what we make it. However, the Middle Way implies a couple of other points here as well. Not only is there no absolute metaphysical meaning to life, but there is no denial of meaning either – life is not meaningless, but rather full of the meaning we find in it. The other crucial point is that meaning is an incremental matter. We are not going to find meaning all at once, as a solution to all our struggles to find meaning. Rather, we can gradually increase the meaningfulness we encounter in life.

I suggest, also, that this incremental meaningfulness is found with our degree of integration. The meaning and value we find in life as a whole, after all, need be no different from the meaning and value we find in different specific things in life: for example, the momentary value we find in stroking a pet, or embracing someone we love. The problem with getting a meaning of life as a whole from these experiences is not that they are not meaningful in themselves, but that this meaning is momentary, and perhaps in conflict with the lack of meaning we may experience at other times. When I’m feeling frustrated in the office later on, the embrace of the early morning is already gone from my awareness.

Thus it seems that we should gradually find more meaning in life the more we become integrated, whether that integration is of desire (bringing our energies together), meaning (bringing our sense of significance together), or belief (bringing our views of the world together). The more we are integrated, the less likely we are to be caught up in inner conflict and frustration, and thus the more likely we are, on average and on the whole, to find life unified, meaningful and fulfilling.

This fulfilment is always relative to the circumstances we find ourselves in. If, for example, you are a citizen of Aleppo being constantly bombed by Syrian government forces during the Syrian civil war, you will spend most of your energy just dealing with extremely difficult and stressful external conditions. However, there will still be more or less integrated ways that you can respond to these conditions. The meaningfulness of your life in such circumstances could only really be measured against what it might have been in different circumstances, whether those circumstances were reasonably secure or even over-protected – not against some abstract absolute. Some people can be destroyed by difficulties, while others gain an intense sense of fulfilment by responding in an integrated way to them.

One of the basic conditions of difficult circumstances in life is the ever-present threat of death. Like other conditions in life, it seems that the key question is whether we can accept death and respond to it in a balanced way, rather than anything about death itself. Speculation about death itself is just a distraction from the Middle Way – whether such speculation involves beliefs about an afterlife (or reincarnation), or the denial of such beliefs. Our living experience gives us no purchase at all in justifying either affirmation or denial of afterlife beliefs, so, for example, the amount of debate about rebirth that distracts Buddhists who are otherwise interested in practising the Middle Way is rather unfortunate.

Death itself seems to be just a condition of life. It is something we are often inclined to forget that it is the temporariness of our living experience that makes it meaningful to us. An eternity of pleasure could be no more meaningful to a breathing, changing creature than an eternity of suffering, as we can only grasp the idea of pleasure or suffering in relation to an experience in which things change. The idea of such an eternity is thus just a symbolic abstraction. In practice, our pleasures are pleasurable and our pains painful only because they are impermanent, and the same could be said for life as a whole.Complaint_in_Hell

So, death is just a condition of life. It may be one that causes us anxiety, but anxiety is just another term for conflict between a part of us that is attached to living experience and a part that recognises the inevitability of death. If we can still that conflict, through integrative practice of one kind or another, there seems to be no reason why we should not make progress in stilling our fear of death.

I understand the sentiment that leads Dylan Thomas to write

Do not go gentle into that good-night,

But rage, rage against the dying of the light!

I read his poem as a protest against passivity and morbidity. It is possible to be too passive in the face of death, or too obsessed with the question of death. If we swap the immediate experience of living for a mere abstract idea of how we might adapt to death, we are merely distracting ourselves from the full use of the life that is available to us. However, I think Thomas’s mistake is to identify the acceptance of death with one partial feeling we have in life. Instead, I think acceptance of death probably comes through integration of our different desires in life. We do not have to fight against our fear of death, but rather incorporate the energy of that fear into an overall recognition that we can live life better in a full acceptance of its conditions – and those conditions include death.