Category Archives: Current Affairs

There is always hope

Climate Change, Current Affairs, Middle Way Philosophy, Politics

In the last few weeks and months, I have sometimes found hope in rather short supply. That’s not particularly due to personal events so much as events in the world at large, particularly those that can be summarised in two evocative words, ‘Brexit’ and ‘Trump’. These are a source of despair primarily because of the bad news they convey about the lack of critical thinking and wider awareness in a large section of the population of the UK and US, together with the apparently disastrous implications of Trump’s election for the already fragile international consensus to act effectively on climate change. Absolutisation appears to rule unchallenged so often in so many minds at crucial times, who are thus paralysed from responding to important conditions by an obsession with straw man targets such as ‘political correctness’, ‘liberal elites’, or the influence of foreign migrants, and apparently animated by an overwhelming nostalgia for past social certainties.

The effects of these obsessions are underlined by George Monbiot in an article called ‘The 13 impossible crises that humanity now faces’, which include not only Trump and climate change, but the possibility of a new financial crisis, the likely collapse of the EU, mass migration, mass unemployment due to automation, a looming food crisis, mass extinctions, (and, added in a comment) antibiotic resistance and the global pensions crisis. To address these kind of conditions, we need every sinew of balanced critical awareness we can gather, yet at the very moment we seem likely to need it most, it seems that the majority of the population is determined to stick its collective head in the sand.

Where is hope at a time like this? Strangely enough, hope always seems to be our default setting, regardless of such bad news. Iain McGilchrist points out that our dominant left hemispheres are subject to a general shallow optimism, ensuring that human beings will always tend to seek a new positive response to their conditions. The shock of bad news is short-lived, and it generally takes us little time before we start seeking alternative positive sides to it. As the Monty Python team memorably sings from their crosses, it’s always possible to ‘look on the bright side of life’.

But is there any justification for this default resurgence of hope? Is it just another aspect of the confirmation bias that makes us so prone to error in the first place? I would argue that there is. There is a shallow source of hope in this default setting, but there is also a deeper source of hope in the wider insights we find whenever we start to move beyond our delusions of the moment. Our embodied nature not only makes us continue to hope, but also helps us respond to frustration by reframing our perspective and gaining a better understanding. Darkness may be followed by a new dawn because, when we are at our most deluded, we are very likely to clash with conditions and be forced towards a more adequate perspective. We will not escape suffering, but we may learn from our suffering. The Middle Way is a way of talking about that capacity for finding new, more adequate perspectives in the face of uncertainty.hope-wojniakowski

Both optimism and pessimism, when adopted as all-encompassing interpretations of the situation, are deluded, and a more adequate position is likely to lie somewhere between them. George Monbiot alerts us to some pressing conditions, but his piece needs to be recognised as a selective interpretation of events. We also have much to be cheerful about. On a personal level, many of us still have enough to eat, comfortable houses, stimulating lives and supportive companions. Worldwide, violence continues to decline (as documented by Steven Pinker); moral attitudes in many countries have transformed so as to respect many groups that were previously oppressed on grounds of race, age, gender, sexuality; human lifespan continues to extend; extreme poverty continues to decline; numbers of people attending school and university worldwide continue to rise. If you raise these points, you may be accused of complacency, just as raising Monbiot’s points may lead to denial or your dismissal as a doom merchant. Nevertheless, questioning both the absolutes of optimism and pessimism remains a crucial aspect of the practice of the Middle Way.

People may associate hope with optimism, but if that optimism is dogmatic or built on little more than our ‘default setting’ it is fragile. A more sustainable hope comes from the Middle Way, because the Middle Way ensures that we are always working towards realism as well as optimism. The best hope is a grounded hope. Rather than being overwhelmed by the perspective of the present, reflection can also help us to take the long view. In the long view, even the impact of Adolf Hitler has eventually faded and been put into perspective, like that of Genghis Khan or the Emperor Nero before him. There is no guarantee that suffering or loss will clear the way for new advances, but mere reflection on the fact that they often do may help us to put things into perspective.

‘There is always hope’ thus seems like a helpful and justified generalisation of human experience. A string of proverbs and truisms (‘Hope springs eternal’ and so on) confirm that it has widely been seen to be so. Our times may be disastrous, but they are still not times for despair.

 

Picture: Allegory of Hope by Wojniakowski

The MWS Podcast 109: Chuck Klosterman on But What If We’re Wrong?

Culture, Current Affairs, The Arts,

We are joined today by the author and essayist Chuck Klosterman who has written books and essays focused on American popular culture. He has been a columnist for Esquire and ESPN.com and wrote “The Ethicist” column for The New York Times Magazine. Chuck is the author of eight books including two novels and the essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. He talks to us today about his latest book But What If We’re Wrong: Thinking about The Present as if it were the Past as well as other aspects of having a sceptical mind-set.


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The MWS Podcast 95: Charles Kenny on why global development is succeeding

Current Affairs, Economics, Health and well-being, ,

We are joined today by Charles Kenny, who is an English/American economist and senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. He’s the author of several books including Overselling the Web: Development and the internet, The upside of Down: Why the rise of the rest is good for the West and we are going to talk about his book Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding–And How We Can Improve the World Even More. In the book he argues that despite the claims that global development has failed due to the income gap between developed and developing nations growing , foreign aid is on the contrary, a powerful and effective tool to build broader global quality of life, aid money can and does work, improves people’s lives and makes the world a better and safer place.

Charles also stressed at the end of the interview that he is very keen to engage, so if you have any comments or questions, fire away.


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The limitations of secularism

Current Affairs, Education, Middle Way Philosophy, Philosophy, Politics, Religion,

The group of people who first agreed to set up the Middle Way Society in 2013 came in contact with each other in the context of ‘Secular Buddhism’. But one of my personal motives in wanting to create a society distinct from Secular Buddhism was considerable dissatisfaction with that label. The best things I found in the Secular Buddhist movement seemed to me neither distinctively Buddhist nor distinctively secular; and the worst were both, somehow managing to combine two types of dogma in unholy alliance. The label was both unhelpfully ambiguous and incoherent, and instead I wanted to put forward a clear and positive account of the best of the values that I found under it, in the form of the Middle Way. Middle Way Philosophy is not Buddhist because, however much it may owe to the Buddhist tradition (which is probably less than instant pigeon-holers assume), it does not accept any authority from it and is far from culturally defined by it (see recent video). But the question of in what ways it is not secularist is an even more vexed one. What does secularism mean? For some people (such as Stephen Batchelor) it seems to mean something similar to the Middle Way, whilst for others it evokes figures like Richard Dawkins and the metaphysical certainties of scientism.Secularism march Andrew West CCSA4-0

My thinking on this point has been stimulated recently by reading this article about the efforts of the French education minister to overhaul the principle of secularism in French schools. The French principle of laicité, often translated as ‘secularism’, means the separation of church and state, so that the state is neutral and religion a matter for the individual. The French minister is concerned that the principle is being misinterpreted by Muslim students as an anti-religious attack on them and their beliefs, and that this is contributing to Muslim radicalisation amongst French young people. French secularism is innocent of contributing to such reactions, the narrative goes, because it is actually there to protect religious minorities and has just been misunderstood. However, I think there are two kinds of problems with this narrative: one concerns the meaning of ‘secularism’, and the other the idea of state neutrality.

The philosopher Charles Taylor helpfully distinguishes three senses of the term ‘secularity’. Secularity 1 is the separation of church and state, as constitutionally required in both France and the US since the eighteenth century. Secularity 2 “consists in the falling off of religious belief and practice, in people turning away from God, and no longer going to Church” (A Secular Age, p. 2). In this second sense the UK is a much more secular society than the US. Secularity 3 is a social 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”.

Secularism, then, could probably be similarly divided, as the belief in the value of each of these respective types of secularity. The French minister’s laicité is Secularism 1. The promotion of atheism and anti-religious sentiment, as in the work of Richard Dawkins, is Secularism 2, which probably in most cases also encompasses Secularism 1. Secularism 3, however, seems to simply mean support for an open society where metaphysical beliefs are not imposed by the group – in that third sense, then, I’d be happy to count myself a secularist (along with most people, including most religionists, in Western society). But the dogmas that threaten open societies are by no means limited to religious ones, making ‘secularism’ possibly a misnomer for this third form. The USSR and other Communist regimes, for example, were probably not secularist in this third sense, given that there were no alternative possibilities, even though they were in the first and second.

The problem encountered by the French minister of education is the association of Secularism 1 with Secularism 2. She argues that keeping religious symbols such as the hijab out of French schools or other public places is not anti-Muslim. However, to me it doesn’t seem so surprising that people often have trouble telling the difference between Secularism 1 and Secularism 2. In practice they may look very similar.

The problem here lies in people’s assumptions about boundaries and about the possibility of neutrality. In official and legal terms the state is neutral, but the state is in practice represented by people, and people are not – indeed cannot – be neutral. Nor can the Secularism 1 of the Republic as a whole necessarily dictate the motives of the flesh-and-blood people who enforce the rules, which may well stray a long way into Secularism 2. The civil servant or other public employee is obliged to try to force neutrality onto herself by repressing her individual beliefs, when these are contrary to the role she has undertaken, and these are very likely to manifest themselves in terms of the body language, tone and whole approach of the ‘neutral’ person. Rather than unsuccessfully attempting to be neutral, the state should be much more selective in its fights and firm in maintaining values that will benefit all, and these may also be easier for the state employee to fully support: but the principle of division of church and state may interfere with that needful discrimination.

In the UK, of course, we also have plenty of problems with this type of false neutrality, associated as it is with bureaucratic managerialism, where paperwork replaces trust, and conceptual ideas of desirable goals are often substituted for informative experiences about how far they are actually occurring. But in matters of religion in the UK, the population has largely been able to persist in its steady drift away from the Church without usually needing to pretend neutrality in religious allegiances. There are up-sides to having an established church, when it is so broad and tolerant. So, broadly I think we have an incrementality about religious commitment that, although riddled with inconsistencies and political hypocrisy, has allowed Secularism 3 to emerge without as much conflict as is found either in France or the US.

So, the trouble with secularism in general could be summarised thus. The separation of Church and State (Secularism 1) is difficult to achieve in practice without anti-religious secularism (Secularism 2). Anti-religious secularism creates conflict, not just in society, but also in the individual, who may repress the religious dimension of their experience and fail to integrate the archetypes that are still powerful even in the strongest atheist. That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be some degree of separation between Church and State, particularly so as to try to avoid discrimination against religious minorities: but the absolute neutrality of the state is a fiction. Secularism in the sense of the open society (Secularism 3) is desirable and achievable, but hardly controversial in the West. To call oneself a secularist in the third sense when it is so strongly associated with the first and second senses doesn’t seem to be useful.

Instead, of course, I think the Middle Way is the answer here. Rather than committing itself to an unattainable neutrality, I think the state should recognise and promote the importance of Secularism 3 as the key to a harmonious and progressive multicultural society. Except that there’s really no need to call it secularism and thus antagonise the religious – it’s a Middle Way approach, and can be associated with agnosticism rather than atheism. A Middle Way approach requires us to recognise where we start, including the metaphysical beliefs that we may start with. At the same time, though, it is both more decisively anti-dogmatic and more even-handed than secularism usually is, in recognising that absolute beliefs are not desirable whether they are positive or negative. With students in school, one needs to recognise their beliefs fully and allow them to be expressed, but at the same time challenge them through a critical and psychological education that undermines both absolute belief and its denial. The riches of a student’s religious tradition at no point need to be denied, but their absolute interpretation of that tradition can be legitimately challenged at every point, and it is the state’s duty as educator to promote such challenges. What is the point of banning the hijab, when in some cases it may be merely a symbol with no practical implications, and yet leaving the underlying absolutist beliefs unchallenged?

The motives behind secularism are often ones that recognise the damaging effects of absolute belief, but secularism can too easily become an absolute belief itself, not only by denying claims that lie beyond human experience, but also by erecting absolute conceptual boundaries between church and state (or between public and private life). It seems to me that many secularists, if they were to look more closely at these issues, might well arrive at a Middle Way position. But it is important to keep the Middle Way separate from secularism so that it remains a basis on which people from any background can find common ground in experience.

Related pages:

Middle Way for Atheists

Religion resources indexed

Review of ‘The Moral Landscape’ by Sam Harris

 

Picture: Secularism March by Andrew West (CCSA 4.0)

Breaking down the Walls of Fortress Europe

Current Affairs, Politics,

I’ve been thinking for a while that I should write something here about the refugee crisis that has been stirring up passions in the media and social media in Britain (and I suspect in Europe and the US too) in the last few weeks. I have been struck for some time by the dogmatic features of a lot of discussion about immigration (though not all), so what I really want to do here is just point out some of the dogmas that I think need to be avoided if we are trying to apply the Middle Way to the issue. Beyond a certain point, in such a complex issue, the Middle Way doesn’t give us specific answers to the dilemmas involved. Questions like exactly how many refugees to admit, how exactly they can be accommodated, or how to avoid encouraging criminal gangs from people-trafficking operations are all more detailed questions of policy on which I’m going to try to avoid being too prescriptive. Instead, I want to reflect on the effect of frontiers on our thinking

Syrian_refugees_in_lebanonNational frontiers are political absolutisations of differences in geography, history, language, culture, religion, ideology etc that would otherwise be incremental. If I travel overland from England to Mauritania, say, I will pass through only 3 other countries (France, Spain, and Morocco), and as I go the climate and culture will gradually but imperceptibly change. By the time I reach Mauritania I will be in a poverty-stricken, Islamic, desert land where slavery is still common: a starkly different place from England. However, since national boundaries in the Sahara are extremely difficult to police, and under the Schengen agreement France and Spain share an open zone, that whole difference has become concentrated at the Straits of Gibraltar (and to a lesser extent at Calais). There migrants and refugees try to scale the fences of the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Mellila, just as they try to cross the sea between Libya and Italy or between Turkey and Greece. All European fear of the Other has become concentrated on those borders, with ‘home’ extended to one side of them and the Shadow lurking on the other side. The British tabloid newspapers have exacerbated this kind of reaction by using consistently negative or dehumanising language about the ‘swarms’ (a word used even by David Cameron) on the other side of it.

Whatever judgements we make need to avoid that absolutisation. Of course, when people of very different cultures are brought together (particularly when they have to share resources), difficulties of communication, adaptation and adjustment will follow. We can’t ignore that condition, but it is an incremental condition, a matter of degree. The ‘swarms’ on the other side of the wall not only share our basic humanity, but are like Europeans in lots of other ways too. Probably to list such ways would be patronising: anyone who has heard refugees interviewed on the media will have an impression of how much refugees are often not very different from us. Indeed, many people who have been refugees in the past are now settled citizens of Britain, the US, and other such countries.

It’s striking how the British tabloid Daily Mail, particularly, moved suddenly from dehumanising refugees to sympathising with their plight, after the shift in public mood that seems to have been triggered by pictures of drowned refugee children. But to blame them for that inconsistency (rather than for their previous negativity) is fallacious: we are all moved by such pictures, for we are embodied humans, not rational automata, and if those emotions help us to address conditions we were not previously addressing, that is helpful.

Frontiers also give us a sense of protective and egoistic ownership over ‘our’ land on this side of them, and this protectiveness can extend to worries about employment, the shortage of housing, and strain on welfare systems. But if we incrementalise such concerns, rather than absolutising them, we may be able to see them in better proportion: perhaps minor inconveniences or drops in service provision for us, and a major help to refugees. Perhaps if refugees did enter Britain in the kind of numbers they have been entering Turkey (where there are 1.9 million, according to UNHCR), we would see a noticeable increase in the strain on housing and welfare (employment is perhaps a different matter, as enterprising people can create their own jobs). But why should Turkey take that strain rather than Britain? How much difference would it really make to everyday life in Britain? Even if some British people would suffer to some extent in some ways, how would that suffering compare to the suffering of the refugees?

Yes, there are all sorts of practical difficulties that stand in the way of breaking down the walls of fortress Europe. I was in a local Green Party meeting the other day that brought some of those difficulties home to me: for example, currently a town in the UK that wants to host refugees will only be funded by central government for the first year to help the local authority meet their needs. Many councils are rejecting the prospect, because they fear that their overstretched budgets will be stretched still further by responsibilities for traumatised people that go on beyond that year. One can hardly blame local council officials, who have to make it all work, from being concerned about such points.

But we also need to keep in mind the big picture that such objectors neglect: that Europe cannot forever maintain a fortress policy. Exactly the same point applies to other developed countries, such as the US and Australia. How many refugees do there have to be, and how desperate do they have to be, before such policy becomes impossible to maintain? No border is absolute, not just in philosophical terms, but in terms of practical maintenance. If climate change produces a great many more refugees, as is often predicted, how will we deal with this? You cannot shut off a large portion of the world’s conditions behind a wall and pretend it is not your business – or if you do, you are engaging in repression, and that repression has a habit of springing back in the future with unexpected and often violent effects. Other social, economic and technological forces are also making the world more integrated, not less. It has been remarked that one of the drivers of the current wave of migration is the internet, where migrants can easily find out about their dreamed-of destinations.

How we precisely address these conditions is another matter. An open-door policy might actually produce a lot less conflict and suffering in the long-term. Of course we shouldn’t neglect the possibility of social conflict that might be created by such a policy. The details of where the right balance lies can only be worked out by those responsible, with all the practical information. But for those of us on the sidelines the general best policy seems clear: we need to work on the basis of the big picture, and that also means opening our hearts – not indulging our projected archetypal fears about the shadowy people on the other side of the border.

Picture: Syrian refugees in Lebanon (public domain)