Category Archives: Video

Cosmopolitanism

Culture, Geography, Philosophy, Politics, Video,

Cosmopolitanism is the belief that one is a citizen of the world, not just of one particular piece of it that happens to have been sectioned off in a particular fashion by geological movements or medieval bloodshed. Such a position could be over-idealised, but I think it could also be understood as a realistic and balanced position that addresses wider conditions as well as more immediate ones. What’s more, I very much feel we need more cosmopolitan thinking in the UK at the moment, where the media is often consumed in a blaze of narrow arguments about the EU, leading up to the June referendum on membership.Kwame Anthony Appiah from video Almost all these arguments, even those of the ‘remain’ camp, concentrate overwhelmingly on an assumed national interest. But personally, when I vote on June 23rd, I shall do so not just as a citizen of the UK, but also as a citizen of the EU and of the world.

In this video, Kwame Anthony Appiah (a philosopher working in the US, who is descended from Ghanaian chiefs on one side and Sir Stafford Cripps, UK cabinet minister, on the other) gives a persuasive account of cosmopolitanism and its advantages.

As Appiah explains here, Cosmopolitanism recognises the value both of our commonality with the whole world, and of cultural difference. His most important message is that our moral concern does not and should not end at national borders. Why should it, when national borders are the arbitrary results of geography, past conflict, and absolutised tribal, linguistic or religious difference? Borders of any kind are an attempt to absolutise differences that are merely incremental and that (however strong they may be) in any case do not necessarily require separate political organisation. Borders are also a political reality that we have to adapt to, but hardly one that we should be spending our energy strengthening when there are so many better places to put that energy. As the Pope memorably said recently with reference to Donald Trump’s wall-building aspirations, we should be building bridges, not walls.

As with any ideology, there is a risk that cosmopolitanism could become idealised and absolutised. It could start to ignore the political borders that do operate, and the even more important psychological condition of people’s limited identification. It may well be that the EU has made some misjudgements based on such idealism, particularly its admission of Greece to the Euro without adequate scrutiny of its long-term financial stability. Integration of the world needs to be incremental, and cannot proceed too much in advance of the integration of the individual people who are its citizens. The EU has made some astonishing achievements in integrating Europe both politically and culturally during the past 50 years or so, but it probably needs a period of consolidation now, for the people and their culture and economic life to catch up with it. However, the EU’s mistakes, such as they are, are hardly an argument for reversing many of its achievements by withdrawing one of its most Important states from the union.

If we focus on a recognition of our embodiment and its limitations, that may seem to bring with it a more localised focus, recognising the strengths of our immediate environment and culture. But a localised culture is not necessarily a parochial culture that tries to separate its interests from those further afield. Our embodiment is also a source of universality, as we have pretty much the same basic body and brain structure as all other humans throughout the world. All that we have to do to recognise our cosmopolitanism is to recognise our embodied humanity, and to give it more importance than narrow tribal identity. If you want to look more beyond narrow tribal identity, then look to the influences you expose yourself to. For example, your media sources: populist UK newspapers like the Daily Mail will expose you to the assumptions of narrow tribal identity day after day, and I’m sure there are similar sources in other countries. Don’t assume that such narrow sources won’t have an effect. It will have an effect because you have a body, rather than being a disembodied reason that can consider every issue afresh at every moment.

I do think that cosmopolitanism is an ideological approach that could quite readily be an expression of the Middle Way in most cases, provided we are careful not to absolutise it. For most of us, dogmatic nationalism is a far greater danger in practice than dogmatic internationalism, and cosmopolitanism combines an internationalist outlook with a full respect for cultural difference and localised autonomy. I think it is only through such an outlook that, in the longer-term, it is possible to address the conflicts in the world adequately. I also see the EU, whatever its short-term errors or limitations, as a cosmopolitan institution whose founding principles of internationalism linked with subsidiarity try to follow that balance. So there are not too many prizes for guessing which way I will be voting on 23rd June.

NB. This article has been reproduced by a site called ‘Multinational News’. Please note, if you have come here from that site, that ‘Multinational News’ has pirated this article without permission from the author.

What is wisdom?

Middle Way Philosophy, Philosophy, Practice, Video,

Wisdom is our most important practical quality, but it often seems to be more the basis of fantasy than cultivation. Given an educational system that will barely mention it, it is hardly surprising if wisdom to many people primarily means wizards with long beards and flowing robes. If we have not even reflected how far we have it ourselves, it’s not surprising if it’s projected onto distant figures. But wisdom is about how you make judgements: about, say, what to eat for lunch, or how to respond to that irritating colleague, or whether to spend the evening reading or browsing the internet. We all have it to some extent, and we lack it in other respects.Wise old woman Ferdinand Reus CCSA 3.0

Wisdom should not be confused with knowledge. It is not about what you know, unless it’s about recognising how little you know (as Socrates famously said, he was only wise in the sense of recognising his ignorance). That means you could conceivably be quite wise with little education. Nor is wisdom an automatic benefit of age: you only have to reflect on the narrow-mindedness into which some older people sink to see that.

Instead, I want to suggest that wisdom is a quality dependent on how well we use the experience we have. If we only interpret experience in terms of narrow assumptions, that experience will be useless to us, and will not enable us to learn. Instead, experience will only re-confirm the assumptions we already carry. That’s the positive feedback loop we can get into if we are fixated on ‘knowledge’ or ‘truth’, believing that we have these things and then making our experience fit.

To become wiser, then, we will need to avoid these kinds of fixed beliefs, whether they are positive or negative, but investigate closely, even amongst sets of beliefs we otherwise reject, for ideas that are relevant and helpful. That means that, for example, the wise socialist will try to learn from conservatives even whilst rejecting dogmatic elements of conservatism (and vice-versa). Or if you have a strong belief in yourself as, say, destined to be a successful artist, but end up rejecting that belief as unrealistic, to cultivate wisdom in relation to that belief you will search around for aspects of that artistic aspiration that you can carry forward into other visions of your life.

Wisdom is often contrasted with compassion, but I want to suggest that the two are only conceptually distinguished: in practice they are inseparable. That’s because ‘reason’ is inseparable from ’emotion’, and it’s only a series of unhelpful cultural and philosophical habits that makes us often separate them too sharply. To be wise is to be compassionate, because whenever you challenge fixed beliefs about a person, you also challenge fixed feelings about them. By entering into more open beliefs about them, you also enter into more open emotional responses. By developing provisionality you also develop love, in a sense that avoids both hatred and possessiveness. Of course, the development of wisdom can only continue from wherever you start in emotional as well as cognitive terms, and someone who finds empathy difficult will not magically find it easy because of greater wisdom: but they will be more compassionate than they were before.

I’ve recently completed a video that explores the theme of wisdom in terms of the integration of belief. The integration of belief is simply a term for that process of sifting absolute beliefs from more helpful provisional ones – the process of developing wisdom and compassion. Here’s the video.

Picture by Ferdinand Reus (Wikimedia Commons) CCSA 3.0

Excavating agnosticism

Middle Way Philosophy, Philosophy, Practice, Religion, Video, ,

You may think you know what agnosticism is, but I think there is far more to it than meets the eye once you start digging. I have just finished producing a series of videos in which I try to make a comprehensive case in digestibly-sized chunks. Agnosticism

First of all, agnosticism is a practice, not a failure of decision. It is not just about God, but God just happens to be a particularly well-known example of a pair of metaphysical opposites (theism and atheism) to which agnosticism offers a third alternative. It does not involve hanging onto impossibilities, but rather coming to terms with them. Far from being passive, it involves an effort not to be sucked into the absolutizing extremes that dominate discussion (the diagram here, though it may remind you of a football referee, represents the potentially isolated position of the agnostic between dominant groups).

If those points surprise you, you will need to start by looking at the introductory video on agnosticism.

But there’s much more to be said after this. What, after all, is wrong with the extremes in the first place? I want to argue that it’s not simply a dogmatic failure of justification that’s wrong with it (though that is bad enough), but much more seriously, the role of metaphysical (i.e. absolute) beliefs in repressing alternatives, and thus constantly limiting the new conditions we can address, as well as creating conflict. In ‘what’s wrong with metaphysics’, I argue that metaphysics should not be confused with basic or prior claims (a common move by philosophers), that absolute metaphysical claims cannot be held provisionally, and that their only function is to maintain unconditional loyalty to groups or authorities. Metaphysics is a power ploy rooted in a past era when it may possibly have been necessary – but it now greatly hampers us. It’s geared for ancient armies, not modern democracies. That’s why we really need to be agnostic.

But after showing what’s wrong with absolute belief, it’s then very important to rescue the meaningfulness of absolute terms. Terms like God, truth, Satan, nature, beauty etc. should not be objects of absolute belief, but they can still be fully appreciated as archetypes with crucial meaning in embodied human experience. That means that we really can have our cake and eat it: we can participate in religious life without compromising our integrity or triggering the repression and conflict that often accompanies religious ‘belief’. Metaphysical belief is in no way necessary to what religion has to contribute to human experience. All we have to do is separate absolute belief from archetypal meaning.

The practice of agnosticism also demands clarity about what it is we’re avoiding, and the balanced treatment of positive and negative kinds of absolute claim as equally unhelpful. This is the subject of the final two videos. ‘Sceptical slippage’ deals with the tendency to slip from agnostic to negative positions. It offers some explanations as to why we tend to do this, and thus why agnosticism is so unfairly treated in much dominant thought. The final video, ‘Even-handedness’ offers some practical principles for maintaining a clear balance so as to be able to practise agnosticism without giving too much weight on one side or the other.

Making sense of non-dualism

Middle Way Philosophy, Philosophy, Video

The term ‘non-dualist’ is widely used to refer to various types of spiritual philosophies or practices, but there are a number of difficulties and confusions involved in the use of term. When I first started developing Middle Way Philosophy in a Ph.D. thesis 15 years ago, I used the term as a primary one to describe my position. But as I found it subject to a great many misunderstandings, I let it recede to the background – though it has still been present as a potential term for the Middle Way.

I have recently made this video to present some of the key ideas around non-dualism and try to head off the misunderstandings.

A useful sense of ‘non-dualism’, then, as I argue here, involves a degree of faith in the possibility of avoiding absolutised beliefs. We do not need to structure our lives around absolutised beliefs, nor assume them for everyday living. That doesn’t mean that we will necessarily get rid of them entirely, but it does mean that experience offers us alternatives to the dualistic stranglehold of opposed and conflicting basic beliefs.

More commonly, however, the term ‘non-dualism’ is conflated with ‘non-duality’, and this is seen as some kind of ultimate truth about the lack of subjects and objects in the universe. Such ‘non-dualism’ is self-undermining and contradictory, because the belief in non-duality itself involves absolutisation. We might have meaningful, archetypal ideas about non-duality, but it cannot helpfully be an object of belief. The same goes for the related term ‘monism’. Monism is the belief that everything in the universe is ultimately one. Again, this is just another metaphysical belief, and does not help us to psychologically identify and work with absolutisation. There is nothing practically different about believing that everything in the universe is ultimately one, and that it is ultimately two or multiple: either way we have to impose that view on our experience and in the process repress alternatives. Our experience is not of ‘things’ nor of the absence of ‘things’, prior to the ways in which we designate ‘things’ for practical reasons.

I made this video tributary to the one on incrementality, because I think incrementality is the aspect of the Middle Way that most directly addresses dualism. Wherever we find a questionable separation between objects and/or subjects,  try re-conceiving that discontinuous distinction as an increment or a matter of degree. This is the basis of a range of potential practices that can help us to undermine absolute thinking.

New videos on embodied meaning and optionality

Middle Way Philosophy, Psychology, Video, ,

Two new introductory videos have recently been added to the site:

Embodied Meaning and Scepticism explains how the recognition that meaning lies in our bodies shows the delusion involved in absolute beliefs, and thus supports the Middle Way.

Optionality explains how an aspect of the practice of provisionality is having different options available to us: which is not merely a matter of ‘choice’, and helps us adapt to different new conditions.

These are both part of the introductory series of videos on Middle Way Philosophy, all of which can be accessed by hovering over ‘media’ and ‘Middle Way Philosophy introductory videos’ on the menu above.