Category Archives: Middle Way Philosophy

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.

Middle Way Thinkers 8: John Dewey

Great Thinkers, Middle Way Philosophy, Philosophy,

I find John Dewey one of the most interesting and inspiring figures in modern philosophical history. He was a pragmatist, meaning that he sought to prioritise practical experience over dogma as a guide to our beliefs. He was a highly synthetic thinker, particularly bringing together science and empiricist philosophy with the Continental Hegelian philosophy that had influenced him in his youth. Although he had a successful university career as a philosopher, he was far from limited to that field, and also engaged deeply in issues of psychology, education, society and politics. Above all, over a very long life (1859-1952), Dewey gathered enormous respect from many sides as a humane, liberal figure, a personal inspiration for many that was probably due to a high level of personal integration.John_Dewey_in_1902

Dewey came from Burlington, Vermont and his cultural background is very much that of New England liberalism. He studied at the University of Vermont and then (after an interval of school-teaching) did a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins, followed by academic posts at the universities of Michigan, Chicago and Columbia. By the time he died, at the age of 92, he left behind a massive corpus of writings, so great and wide that it is very difficult to know where to start. In those days it was not so difficult for a philosopher to also be respected as a psychologist and educationalist, and to also become a public intellectual. Not surprisingly, he stressed the value of a philosophy informed by psychology, recognising the emotive basis of cognition and thus the unhelpfulness of a purely analytic approach. Influenced by his integrative psychology and liberal politics, he stressed an approach to education that stressed the development of autonomous judgement and integrated character.

That Dewey was a Middle Way thinker in many respects comes across from a number of key writings. I am very far from having read even a substantial fraction of Dewey’s vast output, but in what I have read, the following passage particularly stands out in encapsulating Dewey’s stance as a Middle Way thinker. It was written in his old age, in 1944 when he was 84 years old:

“[My view] assumes continuity; [whereas the dominant theories of knowledge] state or imply certain basic divisions, separations, or antitheses, technically called dualisms. The origin of these divisions we have found in the hard and fast walls that mark off social groups and classes within a group: like those between rich and poor, men and women, noble and baseborn, ruler and ruled. These barriers mean absence of fluent and free intercourse. This absence is equivalent to the setting up of different types of life-experience, each with an isolated subject-matter, aim, and standard of values. Every such social condition must be formulated in a dualistic philosophy, if philosophy is to be a sincere account of experience. When it gets beyond dualism – as many philosophies do in form – it can only be by appeal to something higher than anything found in experience, by a flight to some transcendental realm. And in denying duality in name such theories restore it in fact, for they end in a division between things of this world as mere appearances and an inaccessible essence of reality.” (Democracy and Education)

This passage brings out Dewey’s concerns about social division, and his recognition of the relationship between group identity and dogma, in which one group will seek absolute allegiance and reject a counter-group by using metaphysical beliefs as rallying point. It also shows his ability to see through the religious absolutisations that were still highly influential in his lifetime. It will not be sufficient to break down class divisions in society, he is telling us, merely to appeal to a classless God or a classless political ideal – we will need to recognise that this appeal itself will create a new dualising effect, an absolutisation in which the ‘other’ is rejected. The only solution to such a re-emergence of conflict, even in the beliefs of those who may sincerely want to overcome it, is continuity – to see how even opposing beliefs and ways of life may nevertheless be judged using the same incremental scales in relation to similar conditions. In this continuity lies the possibility of overcoming conflict. This dialectical aspect of Dewey’s philosophy is influenced by Hegel, but he left behind all the more dogmatic elements of Hegelianism.

Linked to this viewpoint is Dewey’s well-known emphasis on democracy. Dewey might fairly be accused of idealising democracy, but very often ‘democracy’ comes to mean for him something like the Middle Way – not just a system of government but a whole way of determining the values of society that respected autonomous development and the hard-won fruits of experience. At the same time democracy needs to reject raw power and its appeals to dogma to maintain itself. The values of democracy require those of education – of the development of autonomous individuals able to make adequate judgements for themselves and reject the dogmas used by tyrants. This kind of approach seems to reflect some of the best elements of the American tradition of liberal democracy.

Dewey’s approach to ethics was consistent with his belief in the importance of autonomous judgement in the public realm, and with continuous thinking rather than appeals to absolute in individuals. He rejected that fact-value distinction, and stressed the development of a reflective equilibrium, taking into account as many factors as possible, in the development of an adequate ethical standpoint. This subtle psychological ethics has more recently been adopted by such figures as Mark Johnson and Philip Kitcher (interviewed in the MWS podcast), and offers the promise of a far more adequate ethics than a mere appeal to one dominant rational ethical theory to solve all our problems (such as utilitarianism or Kantianism).

Of course, there are some ways that I think Dewey fails to hit the Middle Way on the evidence so far. However, I am uncertain how far some of these judgements are fair because of the size and breadth of his writings and the limitations of my reading so far. Perhaps the major limitation is that Dewey identifies himself (and is often identified) as a naturalist. Naturalism can take all sorts of subtle forms, and does not necessarily mean crass materialism or what Mark Johnson calls ‘science-mongering’, but it nevertheless to me seems mistaken because to be worthy of the name it must still in some respect be seeking an account of right understanding and values in accounts of ‘nature’ rather than in the balancing of our own approach to what we experience. Dewey does at times seem to appeal to nature and to evolution in ways that I sometimes remain doubtful about, even though those doubts really need further investigation.

Dewey’s possible strayings from the Middle Way, if they exist, remain controversial and subtle, and may often be the result of limitations of information available to him in his time as opposed to ours (for example, he would have known little about meditation). Such issues are utterly dwarfed by Dewey’s positive achievements as a subtle, integrative, humane and compassionate figure, active in society as he was in the intellectual realm. Nevertheless, he remains neglected by modern analytic philosophers, psychologists and politicians alike, who often seem unable even to really take in, let alone emulate, such a synthetic figure from an earlier age.