Category Archives: Middle Way Philosophy

The Age of Wonder

Books, History, Middle Way Philosophy, Science

Over-specialisation, with its attendant false dualities between different areas of thought, is in my view a major issue of our time. It even affects our widespread current inability to face up to the climate crisis, as the authority of specialised experts is such a matter of conflict wherever scientists have to communicate unpalatable findings to the wider population. Surely, I often reflect, if we had a slightly more adequate education system in which both critical thinking and general psychological awareness featured more strongly, it would be a good deal harder for opportunistic denialists to gain such a popular following, and the politics of facing up to difficulty would be at least a bit easier? There are potential future ways of healing the rift – if we have a future, that is.

From time to time, though, I find contemplating the current and likely future situation too much to bear, and take refuge in the past. The past, particularly, before all this specialisation – of the gentleman scholar and the polymathic clergyman. In no way do I want to idealise the past, but it does show us in some ways, not only that things can be done differently, but that they have been. The difference is nearly always that in the past, the things that were better only applied to a very small minority, whereas now our expectations have risen to such an extent that we expect everyone to share in any improvement. When I look (with a temptation of nostalgia) at a less specialised past I have to keep reminding myself of this. Nevertheless, the intellectual integration that some groups managed in the past can still potentially be developed by a wider population in the future.

My appreciation of a pre-specialist past has been boosted recently by reading a book by Richard Holmes (best known as a biographer of Romantic English poets), called ‘The Age of Wonder’, published in 2008. This book offers an account of a crucial phase in the development of science (focusing especially on Britain), from around 1770 to around 1830, but also highlights its constant connections with the Romantic movement. It may come as news to many that during this period all scientists, as well as other thinkers, were still known as ‘philosophers’, as they were in ancient Greece. Such great figures as Joseph Banks (botanist and anthropologist), Humphrey Davy (chemist) and William Herschel (astronomer) described themselves as ‘natural philosophers’. Herschel was also a musician and Davy a poet. Davy was a close friend of Coleridge, Southey and other poets: the arts and the sciences actually talked to each other and maintained an integrated view of the world!

The theme of wonder, that gives the title to the book, is an important one. Poets and scientists were united by wonder, and wonder is an open emotion implying a strong continuing access to experiential right hemisphere perspectives. Though of course none of these figures were free of dogmatic assumptions, their sense of wonder, and their social sharing of it, could provide a check to the tendency of a specialised theoretical perspective to assume that its view of the world provides a total explanation. Not only did this make these great early scientists apparently open to new forms of discovery, but it also made them much more flexible in their use of their expertise than one would expect from a modern academic. Sir Humphrey Davy not only pioneered our understanding of the constituent gases of the atmosphere, the carbon cycle, and the isolation of substances like chlorine and iodine through electrolysis, but he also developed a safety lamp that greatly reduced the likelihood of coal miners dying in gas explosions. Today that would be considered the work of a technologist, not a scientist, but in Davy’s day there were no such distinctions.

There was wonder, too, in William Herschel’s astronomical achievements. Not only did he discover Uranus, but he was also the first to recognise the vast distances between the Earth and the stars, together with the existence of galaxies. He did this partly by developing larger and better telescopes, but also (on his own account) by just learning to look at the stars. Observation became not just a matter of passively watching, but rather a matter of actively altering your method of observation so that the visual data coming through the telescope made sense. There was wondering receptivity as well as theoretical expectation there, in a form that can add to our confidence that Herschel was not merely observing what he wanted to observe. We can never entirely rid ourselves of confirmation bias, but we can definitely make a difference.

In the hands of these inspirational early scientists, science often seems like a Middle Way practice – one in which we are constantly adjusting our view of the world in the light of new experiences and perspectives, rather than seeking only to confirm or deny. Of course, there are also many modern scientists who take this approach. There are also far more educated people in the population able to understand what they do than there were in 1830. Nevertheless, it seems to me that something important has been lost, not always in individual attitudes, but primarily in the educational and academic system that frequently isolates those individuals from each others’ perspectives. Academics can usually only compete effectively in their specialised niches by hardening their assumptions to fit the social expectations of that discipline. The relentless managerialist emphasis on ‘efficiency’ of research in modern academic life also removes much of the leisure enjoyed by those in the Age of Wonder, and so further closes the doors of wider exploration.

There are also many signs of a thirst for a return for that lost interdisciplinarity today. Recently I was intrigued to learn of the launch of the London Interdisciplinary School, due to open its doors in 2020 to an entirely interdisciplinary cohort of students. They were looking for founding faculty, so I applied, but I’ve since heard that they had 612 applications for 6 places. I thus don’t expect to be successful, but this tells you something about how much pent-up longing there is to get back, in some sense, to the age of philosophers worthy of the name (ones who are not just experts in Dismissiveness Studies).

The Age of Wonder is after all still going on, and will continue as long as we are capable of wonder.  We’ll be capable of wonder as long as we can reach out beyond our own little niches of assumption – whatever they are. As long as we’re capable of wonder, we’ll also be capable of creative discovery.

The MWS Podcast 147: Robert M Ellis on the Buddha’s Middle Way

Books, Buddhism, Middle Way Philosophy, Podcast,

We are joined today by the philosopher and founder of the Middle Way Society. Robert has been a regular guest on the podcast and is the author of a range of books on Middle Way Philosophy, both within and beyond Buddhism, including The Christian Middle Way (Christian Alternative 2018). He has a PhD in Philosophy and a Cambridge BA in Oriental Studies and Theology. He has taught in many different contexts, and was formerly a member of the Triratna Buddhist Order. He’s here to talk to us about his latest book The Buddha’s Middle Way (Equinox 2019).


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The ‘3.5% rule’, stubborn minorities and tipping points

Activism, Books, Business, Climate Change, Middle Way Philosophy, Politics, Systems Theory, ,

The recent protests in the UK by Extinction Rebellion have stimulated discussion of the so called ‘3.5% rule’, that 3.5% of population need to join a protest movement for it to succeed. This is based on research by Erica Chernoweth, which is discussed in this BBC article. Chernoweth looked at a variety of protest movements, and found they tended to succeed if they reached that threshold, as we see for instance in the civil rights movement in the US in the 1960’s and quite recently in the overthrow of  Omar al-Bashir in Sudan.

How can a whole society be changed by such a relatively small proportion of people? It all depends how determined they are – but if they have taken to the streets, even willing to face arrest or potential violence, they are obviously resolved. This research seems to offer an example of a much wider property of systems, whereby it only takes a relatively small but unyielding element of a system to force a modification in the way the whole system operates. I have come across this same point discussed from different standpoints in two other places: Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book Skin in the Game (2018) and Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point (2000).

Taleb talks about the power of stubborn minorities, giving the example of orthodox Jews who want food labelled kosher obliging US food manufacturers to include it on their label. The proportion of orthodox Jews in the US is, according to Taleb, only 0.3%, but nevertheless, because this 0.3% were very definite and uncompromising about what they wanted, and because it did not require any great sacrifice on a food manufacturer’s part to label kosher food as such, they did so. So you may not need anything like as much as 3.5% if not too much is demanded of everyone else.

Taleb’s other example is the gradual replacement of Muslims for Coptic Christians in the population of Egypt. The Copts are now a minority of about 10% of the Egyptian population, but after the Muslim takeover in the eighth century they were the great majority. The Muslims were tolerant and did not force anyone to convert. What made the difference, however, is that Muslims refused to contract marriage with anyone who did not convert to Islam. All it took was that degree of unyieldingness, over many centuries of just a trickle of mixed marriages, for the Coptic majority to become a minority.

Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point approaches the same phenomenon from the standpoint, not of minority resistance, but of minority enthusiasm. He offers story after story of new products or ideas that suddenly ‘took off’: hush puppies, Blue’s Clues, The Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. The apparent causes of them doing so are not consistent, but in every case a kind of group epidemic occurred: the product suddenly ‘went viral’ after passing a ‘tipping point’. The sales chart started rising, not arithmetically, but exponentially. It’s clear that there are lots of reinforcing (or closed) feedback loops going on that are leading more and more people to adopt the product, because it has become a mark of acceptance by the group to do so.

What does all this have to do with the Middle Way? Well, it seems likely to me that what is often, though not always, going on, when people reach a tipping point of this kind, is absolutisation. People get into feedback loops in which the desire for the new thing (or rejection of the old thing) is driven by obsessive desire for social acceptance (or fear of losing it), and such feedback loops have the effect of producing sudden exponential change. That change is easy for even a very small group to achieve when the sacrifices demanded are small and the resistance is low (as in labelling kosher food), and require the magic 3.5% when there is some resistance, but the majority resistors are still much less strongly motivated than the minority.

But do minorities always only get what they want through absolutisation? I suggested that absolutisation may often be the source of the unyieldingness, but not always. Instead, it must be possible to be unyielding for far more justifiable and considered reasons – that one is confident of one’s cause, that it is supported by good evidence, and that it is far better justified than any alternative view. This, I hope, is what we are seeing with the campaigns of Extinction Rebellion. All the evidence I have seen so far suggests that they are very careful to try to combine a sense of urgency with calm. We need to ‘panic’ in the sense of acting urgently in response to the climate emergency, but not to ‘panic’ in the sense of locking ourselves into closed feedback loops of obsession or anxiety. This suggests that a tipping point can be reached, on a genuinely important issue, by following the Middle Way rather than any absolutized belief.

However, we also need to beware of the same phenomenon being utilised by absolutists, whether it is to advertise a product, spread a conspiracy theory through social media, or get people to accept a simple idea (like Brexit) that is grasped at as a false solution to complex problems. It takes a lot of effort and difficulty to reach a tipping point without absolutisation – but to do it with absolutisation seems so much easier! Fast thinking and easy solutions are always appealing, but there is no alternative to the harder road to the tipping point if you want to make the world a better place.

 

Picture by Michal Parzuchowski (Unsplash)

Learning the craft

Education, Middle Way Philosophy, Practice

I’ve never been much of a craftsman. By that I don’t just mean that I haven’t developed much skill with my hands. I’m thinking more of the way that a craft requires its practitioners to adopt and work within a particular set of socially sanctioned standards. To learn how to work wood, make pots, or almost anything else requiring skill, you start off by largely subordinating yourself to the standards you are taught. Ideas about ‘good’ carpentry or pottery, and how to do it well, have been developed over time and passed down to form a tradition with attendant standards. Creativity in such a craft can only come after you’ve accepted those standards and worked within them. You are only then able to stretch them when you’ve fully internalised them and allowed them to format your very understanding of quality itself. This is what Alasdair MacIntyre, the moral philosopher, described as ‘goods in a practice’ – the realistic basis of moral virtue. We can only develop goodness deeply rooted in individual and social experience, he thought, through internalising the standards offered by one or more ‘practices’ – those could be crafts in the usual sense, or sports, or academic disciplines, or professional requirements, or arts, or anything with a social dimension in which there are shared standards – a ‘craft’ at least in a metaphorical sense.

Recently I have been reflecting on my own difficulties with this process. My personal problem, I think, has always been not the discipline of learning any ‘craft’ in this broad sense in itself, but rather the requirement to accept a particular set of constraining rules in order to do so. Hence, the history of my varied academic studies, the history of my attempts to learn foreign languages, my engagement with different subjects when teaching, my engagement with different religious groups, and the history of my relationship to philosophy: all betray what one could unkindly call dillettantism, or more kindly a determined free-spiritedness: an inability to settle into  one set of constraints and make the best of them. Perhaps the furthest I’ve got with any ‘craft’, with the support of a teacher in relatively recent times, has been with classical piano playing. I have at least pursued this for most of my life and got a great deal out of it: but I scraped through my grade 8 piano exam, and to this day am pretty hopeless at any kind of musical theory, scales or even basic key recognition. I’ve got myself through the threat implied by classical music’s standards by scorning many of them.

This tendency has both a positive and a negative aspect to it. The positive side is that it’s been a key condition of my development of Middle Way Philosophy. What’s distinctive about that approach is its synthetic nature – namely the way it brings different kinds of ideas and standards from different sources together for practical ends. I would never have created so much synthetic material if I hadn’t been so impatient with the constraints of any one craft. The drawback of it, though, can be a limitation of the depth of my engagement with any one given area of experience. Sometimes I yearn to be the master of a craft, with the capacity to learn more fully from others that it implies.

What’s particularly made me think about this once more is that I’m currently trying once again to engage with a craft – this time the craft of EFL (English as a foreign language) teaching. I did a basic certificate in this a long time ago, and also have lots of experience of teaching five other subjects (there’s the dilettantism again!), but I’m currently enrolled on a Diploma Course to learn how to do it properly – and preferably also make myself more employable. Like the other teacher training courses that I’ve done (and scraped through) in the past, it’s a challenge. Not intellectually, but because I have to take someone else’s set of apparently unreasonable, arbitrary standards, accept them, and work within them.

I started off in my first observed lesson with Henry V. I had been watching Shakespeare’s Henry V, and thought that the story of Henry V’s invasion of France and the Battle of Agincourt might interest the students. There was lots of vocabulary about combat that might have been of some use to them, because it was used metaphorically in everyday life. So I showed them a video about Henry V, and helped them to draw some combat vocabulary out of it. But was this directed sufficiently towards the needs of the learners? No. Were its aims and objectives clearly focused on their needs? No. Did I teach a manageable and helpful amount of vocabulary, properly contextualised in the way the students could use it? No. In the terms of the diploma, this was a disastrous lesson. Despite a great deal of more general teaching experience, I had nowhere near internalised the kinds of standards that were needed for the performance of the craft.

The key to meeting this challenge seems to be provisionality. I have to remind myself that these standards are a means to an end in a particular context, and that others understand the practical workings of that context far better than I do. The temptation for me is to reject them because they are too constraining – but that would be to repeat previous mistakes. I hope, and believe, that although I’m now in my fifties, I’m not too old to learn this. We’ll have to see how I get on with the rest of the course.

Of course, I do still think that learning one craft is not enough, if the effect is that one then gets stuck in the limiting assumptions of that craft. I still see philosophy as a pursuit that can only gain a helpful identity by being seen as beyond any craft – drawing on many crafts but not being subject to any of them. When I was studying for my Ph.D. in Philosophy, I met another student with a radically different attitude to mine. He described his Philosophy thesis as his “apprenticeship piece”, and was only too willing to embrace the arbitrary constraints of the particular sort of philosophy he was being supervised in. I wondered why on earth he was studying philosophy. Why not be a woodworker? Or at least a teacher?

But it’s likely that we can only get beyond craft, and into philosophy – or perhaps art – by growing up into a particular practice at least to some degree, before we learn to understand different practices in relation to each other. That’s what developmental psychologist Robert Kegan described as stage 4 thinking, where most educated and/or professional adults are to be found. The challenge seems to be not just to aspire to stage 5 thinking, beyond the craft, but also to understand when to embrace stage 4 in a provisional but still practically committed fashion.

 

Distinctive Qualities for the Middle Way

Meaning, Middle Way Philosophy, Practice

This morning, I woke up thinking about what it is that is distinctive about the Middle Way approach that sets it apart from other ways of judging things. To put it more crudely in marketing terms, what is its ‘USP’ or unique selling point? I find that in whatever form I try to convey what the Middle Way is about, many people like to appropriate it into the terms of some tradition or type of thinking that is more familiar to them: for example, Buddhists think of it in Buddhist terms, scientists in scientific terms, and so on. I usually think that they are partially right, but that they are still missing an understanding of what is most distinctive, because synthesis (see different ideas from different sources in relation to each other) is so central to it. So however I try to convey the unique ‘selling point’ of the Middle Way, it will have to be based on a synthesis of different qualities coming together. Those qualities may be found separately in lots of places, but the Middle Way asks one to see them together and in systemic relationship to each other. It starts to arise more fully when they are all brought together.

I worked through a list of lots of different viewpoints, along with what I felt they shared and didn’t share with the Middle Way, and by this means managed in the end to distil a list of five qualities. These qualities, when combined and held together, seem to jointly create a distinctive Middle Way approach, whereas in every other approach that seemed to get near to the Middle Way but not quite hit it, I could identify one of these qualities missing. Of course, in those approaches that are even further from the Middle Way, there will be more than one of them missing. Focusing on these qualities is thus a different (but hopefully complementary) angle from which to understand the Middle Way than the Five Principles that I have been using for some years now. Lets call them the Five Qualities. the five qualities that I identified were synthesis, criticality, gestalt meaning, even-handedness and practice orientation. The diagram below conveys that interdependent aspect.

Firstly, synthesis is the ability to bring ideas together from different places. Without that ability, provisionality, in which we are open to alternative possibilities, is impossible. Synthesis is blocked by domain dependence, where our thinking is stuck in one context where we are used to applying it: for instance, we don’t apply what we learnt at work when we get home. Fixed and essentialised categories can also block synthesis, by making us think in only one way that’s dictated by the framing of the language we’re using: for instance believing that ‘religion’ must be only ever be one kind of thing. The blocking of synthesis is also, in my view, a major problem in academia, where it results in over-specialisation, over-reliance on analysis alone, and relativism about values. Those academic ways of framing things also influence the rest of society.

Secondly, criticality  is the ability to question the current set of assumptions that we are making or are presented with. Even if we are theoretically aware of alternatives, if it doesn’t occur to us to consider the possibility that what we believe might not be true, we can be slaves to confirmation bias, locked into an unhelpful set of assumptions. For instance, people who are mystically inclined may have a highly meaningful, practical and synthetic approach to things, but they also often assume that this view offers ‘ultimate truth’ of some kind. Their failure to apply any criticality to this assumption can again trap them in unhelpful views in practice.

Thirdly, gestalt meaning refers to the recognition of symbols being meaningful because of our embodied experience, channelled through the right hemisphere. This meaning is gestalt because it comes to all at once in an intuition, rather than being conveyed piecemeal. However, when we assemble these gestalt meaning experiences into language through the use of schemas and metaphors, we can use them to express our beliefs, and at that point they become subject to criticality. So putting criticality together with the recognition of gestalt meaning results in the distinction between meaning and belief, and the recognition that we need to treat them in slightly different ways: to appreciate and celebrate meaning, but maintain critical awareness about our beliefs. Many people find this difficult, or are not even aware that it is possible: thus there are many spiritual and artistic people with a strong sense of gestalt meaning but little criticality, and many scientifically or philosophically educated people who are inclined to dismiss anything to do with gestalt meaning as “woo”, because they wrongly assume that it must be a kind of belief that threatens their justified  and critical scientific beliefs. An insufficient openness to gestalt meaning can impoverish our emotional and imaginative lives, and tends to lead us into representational and instrumentalist attitudes in which, for instance, we don’t really respond to others as people like ourselves.

Fourthly, even-handedness is another quality that we need to be able to apply when we are engaging in synthesis, criticality and appreciation of meaning. There are always many different possibilities jostling for our attention, and many different possible beliefs we could adopt. Even-handedness is the capacity to apply a model of balance in our judgements about these, not simply immersing ourselves or committing ourselves to one kind of meaning or belief and completely neglecting another. This is especially important when it comes to dealing with absolute or metaphysical beliefs, as it is so easy to reject one because of its dogmatism without recognising that you are running headlong straight into the arms of its opposite (like people ‘on the rebound’ from a relationship breakup). Even-handedness requires an emotional awareness that the degree of hatred that is likely to accompany your rejection of one view does not have to create a total desire for only one alternative to it.

Finally, practice orientation is the commitment to making your judgements practical and putting them into practice. That will probably mean that you are ‘working on yourself’ through some kind of integrative practice such as meditation, the arts, and/or study, and probably also ‘working on the world’ through some kind of communicative, social or political activity. With practice orientation you are always likely to be asking ‘does this really make a difference in practice?’ and thus have a critical perspective on purely theoretical accounts that take abstract completion as an end in itself. For instance, if someone makes you an argument about the nature of the historical Jesus, you can ask what difference this makes: is it going to change the way that Jesus functions in people’s lives, as a source of advice, inspiration, or archetypal meaning? There are many academic approaches that seem to lack this kind of practice orientation, because they have turned scholarly or scientific investigation within a particular field an end in itself.

Of course, this list may not be complete, and may still be improved upon. But perhaps it can provide another way into the Middle Way, but especially into the question of what is distinctive about it. If you’re not sure about how well a particular approach fits the Middle way, you might like to start by asking whether all five of these qualities are present, at least to some degree.