The next main meeting of the Middle Way Network will be at 7pm UK time on Sunday 8th November. This will start off our new series of topics, on the Middle Way applied to ethics and politics, with the topic ‘Feeling Responsible’. The practice of the Middle Way is closely related to developing our sense of responsibility, but it’s important to distinguish this from the social institution of holding people responsible. The latter has an important role in society, but it is easy to treat it absolutely by applying the assumptions of total freewill or determinism, and thus interfere with the actual development of felt responsibility.
There’ll be a short talk on this topic, followed by questions, then discussion in regionalised breakout groups. Some other regionalised groups will meet at other times. If you’re interested in joining us but are not already part of the Network, please see the general Network page to sign up. To catch up on the previous session, on integration of belief, please see this post. If you would like catch up more with more basic aspects of the Middle Way approach, we are also holding a reading group on 15th Nov which will do this – please contact Jim (at) middlewaysociety.org if you want to join this.
There is already a video on responsibility which will be embedded below, and you might like to watch either before the session or afterwards for further background:
Here is the video of the actual talk and Q&A on the Network session:
Some suggested reflection questions:
What are some examples of things you feel responsible for, and how do you relate to that sense of responsibility?
Are there any things on the edge of your sense of responsibility, where you feel you could helpfully stretch that sense a little?
What conditions or practices do you think have helped you develop your sense of responsibility in the past?
Are there some things you definitely don’t feel responsible for, or even perhaps that it’s a bad idea to feel responsible for?
My guest today is Gavin Haynes, a freelance journalist, writer, presenter and former editor-at-large at Vice. He’s here to talk to us about the Purity Spiral. How a process of moral outbidding is corroding communities from within.
The next main meeting of the Middle Way Network will be on Sun 27th September at 7pm UK time on Zoom. This is the first of a series of three talks and discussions focusing on the nature of Middle Way practice: that is, how we can create the conditions for better judgement overcoming conflict in the long-term. We will be looking in turn at the integration of desire, meaning and belief as interdependent aspects of practice, linked to a potentially wide range of specific practices including meditation, the arts, and critical thinking.
There’ll be a short talk on practice as integration of belief, followed by questions, then discussion in regionalised breakout groups. Some other regionalised groups will meet at other times. If you’re interested in joining us but are not already part of the Network, please see the general Network page to sign up. To catch up on the previous session, on integration in general, please see this post.
There is already an introductory video (18 mins) on integration of desire as part of Middle Way Philosophy, which is embedded below. You might like to watch this for an initial orientation before the session. This is slightly longer than the other introductory videos we’ve had so far, but it goes through some key ideas carefully in a way that there probably won’t be time for in the stimulus talk. It is mainly about cake!
Here is the video from the actual talk on 27th Sept 2020:
Practice and the Integration of Desire
The integration of desire is a way of thinking about practice that can help us to bridge the gap that is too often assumed between our “biological urges” and our “values” or “better natures”. Too often, “ethics” has consisted in telling people to repress their desires in the service of a “higher”, sometimes socially-sanctioned, sometimes “rational” rule. In the longer term, this doesn’t work, because repressed desires have a habit of coming back and re-asserting themselves. That seems to happen just as much at the socio-political level (repressing other groups) as it does at individual level (repressing basic desires). We need a better model of moral practice than merely one of rule-following, and the integration model offers one. Such an alternative model can also be symbolically inspired in the stories of the Buddha by his recognition that asceticism (denying and repressing desire) does not work, and him turning instead to the Middle Way.
Meditation is probably also a basic practice in which we can directly experience how integration of desire is possible, at least on a temporary basis. Simply by relaxing our bodies sufficiently, we can sometimes put what at first seemed overwhelming conflicts in a bigger perspective. Other embodied disciplines, such as yoga or tai chi, may have a similar effect. However, to overcome conflicts of desire in the longer-term we need to also address fragmentation of meaning and conflict of belief, which are the subjects of the following two sessions.
Some suggested reflection questions:
1. Which kinds of desires do you most often experience as conflicting?
2. How could those desires be integrated?
Suggested further reading
Migglismsection 4: ‘Integrating Theory and Practice’ and ‘Meditation’
Middle Way Philosophy 2: The Integration of Desire For a summary of this book by section see this webpage. For full text see Researchgate.
For discussion of the issues in relation to Buddhism, see The Buddha’s Middle Way 1.e (on the Buddha’s renunciation of asceticism) and 6.c (on craving).
The next main meeting of the Middle Way Network will be on Sun 13th September at 7pm UK time on Zoom. This is the fifth of the series looking successively at five principles of the Middle Way (scepticism, provisionality, incrementality, agnosticism and integration), followed by three levels of practice (desire, meaning and belief).
There’ll be a short talk on integration, followed by questions, then discussion in regionalised breakout groups. Some other regionalised groups will meet at other times. If you’re interested in joining us but are not already part of the Network, please see the general Network page to sign up. To catch up on the previous session, on agnosticism, please see this post.
There is already a short introductory video (9 mins) on integration as part of Middle Way Philosophy, which is embedded below. You might like to watch this for an initial orientation before the session.
Integration
Integration is the process by which conflicting desires, meanings and beliefs can be reconciled. It is central to the Middle Way, because it is absolute beliefs that prevent different desires being integrated and thus maintain conflict. We can see how absolutisation creates conflict in all sorts of contexts, from an individual trying to give up smoking to a global conflict between nations. In all cases, it is the ability to reframe the assumptions with which conflicting beliefs are based (as in the story of the two mules on the video), that makes it possible to reconcile these conflicts. A basic attitude is required of reconciling ourselves with our shadows (hated objects) rather than merely trying to eliminate them.
Integration thus forms the basic framework for Middle Way practice that can change our conditions of judgement over a period of time. There are three levels of integrative practice, each of which will be discussed in more detail in the next three stimulus sessions: integration of desire, that unites conflicting desires in the immediate situation; integration of meaning that makes it possible for conflicting selves or people to communicate; and integration of belief that questions our frameworks of assumption and seeks better, more adequate ones. Mindfulness, the arts and critical thinking provide examples of key practices at each level.
Some suggested reflection questions:
Can you think of an example of a recent process of integration you have gone through, whether with someone else or just within yourself?
Try to identify the different stages of that integration that has occurred in your experience, and whether it can be related to the process of the two mules.
What are the desires, meanings or beliefs you find most difficult to integrate?
Middle Way Philosophy 1, section 6: summarised here, full text available here.
Middle Way Philosophy volumes 2, 3 and 4 give a much more detailed account of the different levels of integration. These can all be found in the Middle Way Philosophy Omnibus.
The 75th anniversary of the first military use of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima has been the prompt for London’s Imperial War Museum to commission a a special example of reflective art. Es Devlin and Machiko Weston were preparing an exhibition, but have now produced a remarkable video called ‘I saw the world end’, so we can access their work online instead. This video is well worth watching and reflecting on, so I will embed it below, and it will be followed by some further reflections from me. Is Hiroshima to be a prompt to further conflict, or for learning? Much depends on finding the Middle Way in relation to it. You can see more about the context of the video on the Imperial War Museum site.
One of the things I find most helpful about the video is the way that it combines two perspectives, above and below the line. These can be seen as Western and Japanese, bomber and victim, but they are much more than that. For the most part they use very different sorts of language. Those above the line are scientific and universal: they think in terms of abstract generalities, either in terms of the science that produced the bomb or the justifications that launched it. Below it, however, there is only immediate overwhelmed experience and emotional response: the response of the right hemisphere of the brain that is desperately trying to respond to new experience, rather than the left hemisphere that marks the language above the line. Above the line, too, the language is often passive (rather like academic language, avoiding personalisation), but below the line, the bomb happens to real people in a real situation.
I have been reflecting on the ways that the helpfulness of our response to Hiroshima depends very much on whether we are prepared to straddle that line. A common response for anyone with a degree of sensitivity and compassion today is just to be enormously shocked by what happened, and to immediately feel the bombing to be a monstrous and inhumane action that must never be repeated. As long as we remain with that human experience of what happened and have sympathy with the immense suffering that occurred, we are likely to go on feeling like this. However, if we instead enter the world of the people above the line, we find a very different experience: one of abstract reasoning in which technologies are developed for what are sincerely believed in as humane ends, for the purposes of resisting Fascist regimes that were capable of even greater calculated cruelty than any that might have contributed to Hiroshima. We are in the world of utilitarian reasoning, in which the end justifies the means, and the lesser evil averts the greater one.
The challenge of practising the Middle Way in relation to this topic, as I see it, is to extend our awareness both above and below the line, not prematurely rejecting one tendency above the other, but rather putting them both into as large a context as we can manage. As a former ethics teacher, I have organised debates about the justification of Hiroshima between students, and am aware from this how quickly the whole issue can become over-abstract, as it becomes merely a matter of proving a moral theory, rather than maintaining our sense of what extreme human suffering is actually like. At times it can seem like an insult to the sufferers to debate their fate in the abstract – yet we necessarily do this all the time, whenever we give a specific situation the wider context of its relationship to other situations. At the point of judgement on medical resources, for instance, the suffering of a patient requiring an enormously expensive treatment can no longer be the only thing we consider. We start having to weigh it up against the further suffering that may result by not spending that money on other needful causes. Getting caught up completely below the line can be just as limiting as being caught entirely above it. We have to try to be amphibious, however difficult that may seem.
The utilitarian reasoning for Hiroshima ran along the lines that greater suffering might well result if the Allies continued to fight the war against Japan by conventional means. Japan was deemed unlikely to surrender before the end of the huge bloodbath that a conventional invasion of Japan would have required. The use of nuclear weapons, however, was intended to force a rapid Japanese surrender without this. Of course, such reasoning depends on the accuracy of our assessment of our actions and their likely effects, but in wartime it is very difficult to avoid such reasoning. Similar thinking had already been employed in the war against the Germans when the decision was taken to conceal the fact that the Enigma Code used by German communications had been cracked. Many Allied lives were thus lost in the short term that could have been saved, but in the cause of an ultimate victory. Remarkably, this strategy worked.
So, in my view, we cannot simply dismiss utilitarian reasoning. Utilitarian reasoning is capable of saving the world, and may have already done so. At the same time, we cannot rely on it exclusively, without constantly renewing our wider experience of both the practical and the emotional impact of our actions. However, helpful utilitarian reasoning depends on honest and accurate assessments of the effects of our actions of a kind that are all too rare in practice, taking into account even unknown unknowns as far as we can. Utilitarian reasoning can also be held responsible for much of our past treatment of the environment, and the insufficiently foreseen rebounding effects this is now having on us. There are no single abstract moral theories that can give us all the right answers in any situation, only a toolbox of different responses, and the potential to cultivate the kind of awareness and provisionality we need to use that toolbox wisely. I do not think that we should now try to answer the question of whether Harry Truman’s judgement was right or wrong, because it is our own judgements now that we need to take responsibility for, not his. However, the practice of trying to understand both sides of the question offers valuable resources to us even today.
