Welcome to The Middle Way Society

The Middle Way Society was founded to promote the study and practice of The Middle Way. The Middle Way is the idea that we make better judgements by avoiding fixed beliefs and being open to practical experience. We challenge unhelpful distinctions between facts and values, reason and emotion, religion and secularism or arts and sciences. Though our name is inspired by some of the insights of the Buddha, we are independent of Buddhism or any other religion. We seek to promote and support integrative practice, overcoming conflict of all kinds.

Patrons: Iain McGilchrist and Stephen Batchelor

Believing in Santa Claus

Critical Thinking, Philosophy, Psychology

If we are told about Santa Claus, will we “automatically” believe in Santa Claus?

I’ve recently been reading a big tome – ‘Belief’ by professor of psychology James E. Alcock. In many ways this book can be recommended as a helpful and readable summary of a great deal of varied psychological evidence about belief, including all the ways that beliefs based on perception and memory are unreliable, and all the biases that can interfere with the justifiability of our beliefs. However, I’m also finding it a bit scientistic, particularly in its reliance on crude dichotomies between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ beliefs, for instance. It seems like a good indicator of the mainstream of academic psychological opinion, with both its strengths and its limitations. (I haven’t got to the end of the book yet, so all of those judgements will have to remain fairly provisional.)

One particular point has interested me, that for some reason I had not come across before. This is Alcock’s claim that accepting what we are told as ‘truth’ is “the brain’s default bias”.

There is abundant and converging evidence from different research domains that we automatically believe new information before we assess it in terms of its credibility or assess its consistency with beliefs we already hold. Acceptance is the brain’s default bias, an immediate and automatic reaction that occurs before we have any time to think about it. Only at the second stage is truth evaluated, resulting in confirmation or rejection. (p.152)

One of Alcock’s examples of this (seasonally enough) is the child’s belief in Santa Claus. If people tell the child that Santa Claus exists, he or she will ‘automatically’ believe exactly that. Now, it’s one thing to claim that this is quite likely, but quite another to claim that it is ‘automatic’.

If this is correct, it seems to be a significant challenge to the things I have been writing and saying in the last few years in the context of Middle Way Philosophy. If we automatically believe what we are told, then it seems that there is no scope for provisionality in the way we initially believe it, and we are left only with ‘reason’ – i.e. a second-phase reflection on what we’ve come to believe – to rescue us from delusion. The distinction that I like to stress between meaning and belief would also be under threat, because we could not merely encounter meaningful ideas about possible situations without immediately believing them. So, I was sceptical when I encountered this information. But, it coming from a professor of psychology, I certainly needed to look into it and check my own confirmation biases before rejecting it. Was this claim actually well evidenced, or had dubious assumptions been made in the interpretation of that evidence?

Alcock references a 2007 review paper that he wrote in collaboration with Ricki Ladowsky-Brooks: “Semantic-episodic interactions in the neuropsychology of disbelief”. This paper does summarise a wide range of evidence from different sources, but reading it easily made it apparent that this evidence has also been interpreted in terms of assumptions that are highly questionable. The most important dubious assumption involves the imposition of a false dichotomy: namely that the only options in our initial ‘acceptance’ of a meaningful idea about how things might be are acceptance of it as ‘truth’ or rejection of it as ‘falsehood’. If one instead approaches this whole issue with an attempt to think incrementally, then we can understand our potential responses in terms of a spectrum of degrees of acceptance – running from certainty of ‘truth’ or ‘falsehood’ at each extreme, via provisional beliefs tending either way, to an agnostic suspension of judgement in the middle. The introduction to Alcock and Ladowsky-Brooks’ paper makes it clear that this dichotomy is being imposed when it says that

The term ‘‘belief’’ will refer to information that has been accepted as ‘‘true’’, regardless of its external validity or the level of conviction with which it is endorsed.

If we start off by assuming that all degrees of conviction are to be categorised as an acceptance of “truth”, then we will doubtless discover exactly what our categorisations have dictated – that we accept things as ‘true’ as a default. This will be done in a way that rules out the very possibility of separating meaning from belief from the start. But since the separation of meaning from belief enables us to approach issues like religion and the status of artistic symbols in a far more helpful way, surely we need to at least try out other kinds of assumptions when we judge these issues? Alcock’s use of “true” as a supposed default in the “truth effect” that he claims is so broad that it effectively includes merely finding a claim meaningful, or merely considering it. This seems to involve an unnecessary privileging of the left hemisphere’s dichotomising operations over the more open contributions of the right, when both are involved in virtually every mental action.

The alleged two-stage process that then allows us to reconsider our initial assumption that a presented belief is ‘true’, and decide instead that it is ‘false’, also turns out not to necessarily consist of two distinct stages. On some occasions, we do immediately assume that a statement is false, because it conflicts so much with our other beliefs. However, Alcock identifies “additional encoding” in the brain when this is occurring, implying that both the stages are taking place simultaneously. Yet if both stages can take place simultaneously, with the second nullifying the effects of the first, how can the first stage be judged “automatic”?

So, in some ways Alcock obviously has a good point to make. Very often we do jump to conclusions by immediately turning the information presented to us into a ‘truth’, and very often it then requires further effortful thinking to reconsider that ‘default’ truth setting. But the assumptions with which he has interpreted his research have also unnecessarily cut off the possibility of change, not just through ‘reason’, but through the habitual ways in which we interpret our experience. There is no discussion of the possibility of weakening this ‘truth effect’ – yet it is fairly obvious that it is much stronger in some people at some times than others at other times. He seems not even to have considered the possibility that sometimes, perhaps with the help of training, our responses may be agnostic or provisional, whether this is achieved through the actual transformation of our initial assumptions, or through the development of wider awareness made so habitual that the two phases he identifies are no longer distinct.

This issue might not be of so much concern if it did not seem to be so often linked to negative absolutes being imposed on rich archetypal symbols that we need to appreciate in their own right. If I consult my own childhood memories of Santa Claus talk, I really can’t identify a time when I “believed” in Santa Claus. However, that may be due to defective memory, and it may well be the case that many young children do “believe” in Santa Claus, as opposed to merely appreciating the meaning of Santa Claus as a symbol of jollity and generosity. At any rate, though, surely we need to acknowledge our own culpability if we influence children to be obsessed with what they “believe”, and accept that it might be possible to help them be agnostic about the “existence” of Santa Claus? To do this, of course, we need to start by rethinking the whole way in which we approach the issue. “Belief” is simply not relevant to the appreciation of Santa Claus. It’s quite possible, for instance, for children to recognise that gifts come from their parents at the same time as that Santa Claus is a potent symbol for the spirit in which those gifts are given. We don’t have to impose that dichotomy by going straight from Santa Claus being “true” to him being “false”, when children may not have even conceived things in that way before you started applying this as a frame. If we get into more helpful habits as children, perhaps it may become less of a big deal to treat God or other major religious symbols in the same way.

Apart from finding that even professors of psychology can make highly dubious assumptions, though, I also found some interesting evidence in Alcock’s paper for that positive possibility of separating meaning from belief. Alcock rightly stresses the importance of memory for the formation of our beliefs: everything we judge is basically dependent on our memory of the past, even if it is only the very recent past. However, memory is of two kinds that can be generally distinguished: semantic and episodic. Those with brain damage may have one kind of memory affected but not the other, for instance forgetting their identity and past experience but still being able to speak. Semantic memory, broadly speaking, is memory of meaning, but episodic memory is memory of  events.

Part of what looks like a big problem in the assumptions that both philosophers and psychologists have often made is that they talk about “truth” judgements in relation to both these types of memory. Some of the studies drawn on by Alcock involve assertions of “truth” that are entirely semantic – i.e. concerned with the a priori definition of a word, such as “a monishna is a star”. This is all associated with the long rationalist tradition in philosophy, in which it is assumed that there can be such things as ‘truths’ by definition. However, this whole tradition seems to have a mistaken view of how language is meaningful to us (it depends on associations with our bodily experience and metaphorical extensions of those associations), and to be especially confused in the way it attributes ‘truth’ to conventions or stipulations of meaning used in communication. No, our judgements of ‘truth’, even if agnostic or provisional, cannot be semantic, but need to rely on our episodic memory, and thus be related to events in some way. If we make this distinction clearly and decisively enough (and it goes back to Hume) it can save us all sorts of trouble, as well as helping us make much better sense of religion. Meaning can be semantic and conventional, whilst belief needs to be justified through episodic memory.

Of course, this line of enquiry is by no means over. Yes, I do dare to question the conclusions of a professor of psychology when his thinking seems to depend on questionable philosophical assumptions. But I can only do so on the basis of a provisional grasp of the evidence he presents. I’d be very interested if anyone can point me to any further evidence that might make a difference to the question of the “truth effect”. For the moment, though, I remain highly dubious about it. We may often jump to conclusions, but there is nothing “automatic” about our doing so. Meanwhile, Santa Claus can still fly his sleigh to and from the North Pole, archetypally bestowing endless presents on improbable numbers of children, regardless.

Santa pictures from Wikimedia Commons, by Shawn Lea and Jacob Windham respectively (both CCBY2.0) 

Where the wild things aren’t

Geography, Politics, , ,

I’ve just been reading a highly recommended book by George Monbiot, the radical British environmental journalist, called ‘Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life‘. I think it’s fair to say that it’s transformed my view of rewilding, making me see important connections between it and the Middle Way. I previously thought of rewilding very much as an extreme romantic fringe of environmentalism. Given ever-increasing human exploitation of the planet, I thought it was a hard enough job even to moderate its effects, let alone throw it into reverse. But Monbiot has made me think again.

Part of the power of his book is revealed by the last part of the subtitle: rewilding is very much about us and our relationship to ourselves, not just about a high-minded focus on the environment for its own sake. The wild is a part of us, not just an aspect of the world, that we repress at our peril. Monbiot does not discuss the neuroscience, but the over-dominance of the left pre-frontal cortex, with its over-confident imposition of order and its endless confirmation bias, is an important aspect of the strained human repression of the wild. He effectively shows its self-defeating nature again and again in his account of our defensive attitudes to wildness in the world.

The over-confident imposition of order tends to neglect the complexity of our relationship with the conditions, and thus undermine our own interests in the long run. Generally, the more inequality of land ownership and the more intense the investment in human uses of the land, everywhere in the world, the more intense the monoculture and the more impoverished the biodiversity. ‘Shifting baseline syndrome’ also means that we have very restricted – localised and temporally limited – standards as to what a ‘natural environment’ looks like. This is especially evident in the highly humanised landscape of the UK, in which, for instance, the utterly treeless sheepwrecked landscape of the Glaslyn ‘nature reserve’ in Montgomeryshire is deliberately conserved exactly like that through continual over-grazing – exactly like the rest of Wales – whilst being described as “the wildest and most regionally important site”. You only need to go back a few thousand (rather than a mere hundred) years to recognise that the ‘natural’ vegetation of most of the UK is temperate rainforest, not overgrazed pasture, but it’s not only sentimental members of the public and the National Farmers’ Union who think otherwise, it’s even some ‘conservationists’.

The particularly perverse example of the British uplands is revealed particularly well by Monbiot, as he shows that the extermination of biodiversity is also so much contrary to even a hard-headed economic assessment of human interests. The bare compacted soil of the green deserts barely retains any water, so after heavy rainfall it is the riverside towns in the plains below that flood as a consequence – but the links between sheepwrecking and flooding are barely discussed. The sheep farms are only maintained at the cost of huge EU subsidies – but ones that Brexit will probably not end, as they are also supported by a British government in the pockets of the Farmers’ Union. Monbiot shows that the economic value of sheep-farming to rural communities is also much less than the revenue they could get from tourism if the uplands were rewilded – so the farmers are not even defending a coherent assessment of their own economic interests. One thing Monbiot does not discuss is also that hardly anyone in Britain even eats sheep any more – most of them are live-exported to Europe and the Middle East at the cost of huge animal suffering.

There are only a few pockets of land where re-wilding of the uplands has been tried – but sufficient to prove that it could be done. Monbiot finds those places in both Wales and Scotland (where, in the Highlands, it is deer rather than sheep that are the wreckers). Although much soil has been lost in some places, there is still sufficient in most of the uplands to support trees, together with vastly greater diversity and a much greater capacity for carbon absorption. The development and maintenance of rewilded land can be greatly aided by the re-introduction of top predators, such as wolves and lynx, who keep the numbers of grazing animals in check far more cheaply and effectively than humans can, preventing grazers destroying the forest, and in the process have a dramatic effect on the landscape.

Monbiot gives a big perspective on the possibilities for re-introduction. Reminding us that not that long ago, hippopotamuses were wallowing in what is now Trafalgar Square in London. He doesn’t realistically expect elephants and lions to be re-introduced into Britain any time soon, but does point out that the native vegetation is adapted to their presence: with the splitting properties of willows probably attributable to an ability to recover after elephant attacks. The environmental system has a complexity that we need to understand over a long period of time rather than only in the terms of one time and place. But the most striking aspect of his discussion of re-introductions to me is just the recognition that in some ways we need dangerous and inconvenient animals around for our own psychic health. If there is no wildness and threat, we tend to create our own substitutes, and these may actually be far more dangerous. Personally, reared in safe Britain, I’m not at all ready for coping with dangerous wild animals, and my experience goes no further than believing that a moss-covered trunk in Lapland was a bear, but I can see that it might be good for me to have to engage more fully with that unacknowledged area of experience.

Monbiot also talks at length about the sea, and the massive destruction of its life and biodiversity by nets that trawl the sea-bed. He narrates at length his personal experiences of dangerous forays off the Welsh coast in a kayak. I don’t share his enthusiasm for angling or his willingness to risk his life alone in small boats, but, again, I can recognise the value of this personal attempt to confront and engage with wildness, and the close connection it has with our embodied experience. In the end his argument about the sea is the same as that about the land: to rewild we have to preserve in a way that allows the biodiversity of the sea to redevelop to its amazing pre-industrial levels (where the tales of abundance are practically unbelievable today). Just as sheepwrecked pasture is not a ‘wild’ nature reserve by any stretch of the imagination, nor is a ‘marine reserve’ that still allows commercial fishing.

So what does this have to do with the Middle Way? It is obvious that absolutisation is closely related to the overexploitation and monoculture that has impoverished the environment, not just in Britain but across the world. Though there is also a reverse absolutisation that might try to deny the worth of human beings, the Middle Way nevertheless actually seems to demand quite a radical view – one that focuses on the long-term interests of human beings, rather accepting the deluded and short-sighted assumptions that support absolute monocultural answers of any kind. What is regarded as ‘moderate’ conventionally or politically is not likely to be anywhere near adequate in addressing the conditions here. The Middle Way instead takes us in the direction of allowing complex systems to form relatively stable structures that we are recognised to be a part of: i.e. getting rid of the bloody sheep.

Picture: ewe by George Gastin (creative commons – Wikimedia Commons)

On the Death of Sangharakshita

Buddhism, Great Thinkers, Religion

Over much of the past year, I have been working on a book that is a critical evaluation of the thought of Sangharakshita, the founder of the Triratna Buddhist Movement (formerly the FWBO). This is an exercise in trying to apply the Middle Way to a set of approaches that greatly influenced me in the earlier part of my life, from the mid-1980’s through to 2008, when I resigned from the Triratna Buddhist Order. I have been trying to test Sangharakshita’s ideas by standards that I take to be entirely practical – the standards of Sangharakshita himself at his best. When I was involved in Triratna myself, I actually had little personal contact with Sangharakshita, but had a much closer relationship with members of the Triratna Order who referred to him constantly. Now that I have taken up an evaluative task from without, though, I have actually seen more of him – having six discussions with him between January and June this year. I had arranged a seventh this week, only to hear today that Sangharakshita, after being admitted to hospital with pneumonia, had died. Just as I was reaching the conclusion of my book, by coincidence, Sangharakshita’s life itself has concluded. This is a long-expected event about which Sangharakshita himself was very straightforward, but death still always takes us by surprise.

It is probably fair to say that, without Sangharakshita, there would be no Middle Way Society, at least in the form this one takes. It is from the movement that he founded and shaped that I experienced a living example of a spiritual movement that takes universal elements from Buddhism to apply them in the West, and that puts the emphasis on integrative practice rather than merely belief. It was this model that had influenced me most – both positively and negatively – when I proposed setting up the Middle Way Society, and especially that made me feel that retreats with a focus on practice as well as theory should be an important part of the society’s activity.

Sangharakshita did set considerable store by the Middle Way, and recognised it as an important aspect of Buddhism. One of my discussions with him (in May this year) was recorded as a podcast interview, and was on the theme of the Middle Way and its relationship with Buddhism. I have reproduced this podcast again here. The most interesting part of it begins at around 43:42, where I ask him whether the Middle Way was effectively part of his thinking as he ‘translated’ Buddhism to the West and set up the FWBO/Triratna. Sangharakshita says that he didn’t think it was very much, but also admits that perhaps it should have been, and agrees with me about the distinction between Buddhism and the Middle Way – both that the Middle Way can be found beyond Buddhism, and that Buddhist commitment doesn’t necessarily require people to pay much attention to the Middle Way. Instead, his emphasis was on commitment to the Three Jewels (Buddha, Dharma and Sangha) as constituting Buddhism.

During the past year, I have read far more of Sangharakshita’s work, and reflected on it far more, than I ever did in the days when I was formally (but often reluctantly) his disciple. This process has confirmed me in my view that this point about Sangharakshita’s attitude to the Middle Way is central to understanding both his strengths and his weaknesses. His strengths, at the heart of what he has achieved in Triratna, all arise from the engagement of aspects of Western culture with aspects of Buddhist teaching. His account of mind reactive and creative provides a universal and practical account of Buddhist conditionality teachings. His use of the idea of integration is highly compatible with psychological approaches, and his emphasis on individuality found fertile ground in a liberal democracy. His ideas about provisionality and experimentation even offered a nod towards scientific method – though one that unfortunately did not extend very much further than a nod. All of these offer different approaches to the kinds of judgements that we make when trying to practise the Middle Way – more creative, provisional, integrated and autonomous judgements – and were not necessarily tied to any commitment to the Buddhist tradition. His talk of archetypes even provided ways of interpreting Buddhas in a similarly helpful fashion. This was ‘universal dharma’.

However, to also understand Sangharakshita’s limitations, it is important to take into account his background. As a boy, he spent years in bed as an invalid with a supposed heart condition, reading avidly and setting up a lifetime’s habit of autodidacticism. This made him into a creative and original thinker, but never trained him in the academic habits of consistent critical thinking, nor of adapting his ideas in response to others’ criticism. He was thus poorly set up to actually practise provisionality, or to learn effectively from scientific approaches (which he tended to caricature as ‘materialism’). At the age of sixteen, he says that he read the Diamond Sutra and immediately realised that he was a Buddhist. This evidently gave him a strong intuitive commitment to the Buddhist Tradition that lasted for the rest of his life. Although he was willing to question aspects of Buddhist tradition, such as monasticism, when experience confronted him with its inadequacies, his commitment to the Buddhist tradition often also made him assume that it must be right and accord it endless benefit of the doubt. He allowed members of his Order to be (softly) “agnostic” about rebirth, for instance, but still expected the teachings on rebirth to yield ultimate truths, rather than being willing to drop belief in rebirth as a practically unhelpful aspect of the tradition.

I think these tendencies provide a basic explanation of why Sangharakshita often completely ignored the Middle Way, subjugating it to the authority of Buddhist tradition and making extremely one-sided pronouncements on all sorts of subjects, from the relative spiritual aptitude of women to the supposedly anti-individual nature of Christianity. It does not seem to have occurred to him that the critical process he began in relation to the Buddhist tradition required some sort of coherent justification beyond the limitations of that tradition itself. So instead, many of his followers have substituted the authority of Sangharakshita himself for any such coherent principle. He himself insisted, as recently as 2009, that the basis of the Order should just be what he chose it to be, apparently regardless of the basis on which he judged that it should be like that, and whether that basis stands up to scrutiny. In my view any such absolute appeal to authority as constituting the Triratna Order is completely incompatible with the Middle Way, and with the practical development of integration, provisionality, creativity and individuality that actually makes that Order as effective as it is. As long as it is followed, the Order will be subject to a deeply undermining form of cognitive dissonance, with the authority of Sangharakshita’s words at odds with the practical requirements of the conditions. It is also only because of this contradictory over-reliance on Sangharakshita’s own authority that his moral mistakes in sexual conduct turned out to be so upsetting for so many people.

Now that Sangharakshita has left us, there will understandably be an immediate response of grief and shock in Triratna. However, once things settle down, the Order will presumably feel the same release that children may feel at the death of a parent. They can now make the decisions for themselves to a much greater extent than they could before, and they can choose to make the basis of the Order whatever they choose to make it. I would urge them to make practical and universal principles the clear basis of the Order, with Buddhist tradition having an archetypal and symbolic rather than authoritative function. Only in that way can they extend the benefits of the best of Sangharakshita’s teaching, and of some of the excellent practices they have built up, to a wider section of the population. Heading the home page of Adhisthana, the retreat centre where Sangharakshita lived and where his funeral will shortly take place, is a quotation from Gustav Mahler: “Tradition is the handing on of the flame, and not the worship of ashes”. Now is the time when we will see if the placing of that quotation means what it says.

For myself, I may well go to the funeral to pay my respects to the man I got to know more personally during his final year of life. I also expect to finish drafting my book fairly soon. After that, I am looking forward to moving on from Triratna-related concerns to wider and more pressing ones – particularly those that relate to the political situation and climate change. I have no intention of getting deeply sucked into Triratna again in the long-term, much as I will have learned, and I hope also perhaps contributed, by a temporary period of re-engagement. If Triratna starts to take the Middle Way more seriously, I will welcome that with great gladness. If it does not, I’m happy to leave it to worship its own ashes.

The MWS Podcast 142: Jeremy Sherman on the origin of striving

Books, Meaning, Science,

Our guest today is Jeremy Sherman. Jeremy is a decision theorist researching and writing about choice from the origin of life to everyday living. He teaches college courses across the social sciences and blogs for Psychology Today. He’s here to talk to us about his latest book Neither Ghost nor Machine in which he distils for a general audience the theory developed by renowned neuroscientist Terrence Deacon that extends the breakthrough constraint-based insight that inspired evolutionary, information, and self-organization theory. He argues that emergent dynamics theory provides a testable hypothesis for how mattering arose from matter, function from physics, and means-to-ends behavior from cause-and-effect dynamics. In effect that what this offers, is a physics of purpose and can make science safe for value, We’ll also talk about how this all might relate to the Middle Way



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