Wisecrack Edition: HER - Why You Suck at Dating

Spike Jonze's 2013 film "Her" is ostensibly a movie about a man who falls in love with his computer. But if you look a little closer, it's actually more like an advice manual about how we can get better at human to human relationships. Allow us to explain in this Wisecrack Edition on Her: Why You Suck at Dating.

PolyMatter: China’s Plan to Reincarnate the Dalai Lama

New Statesman: The paradox of an atheist soul

When exploring the idea of the soul Cottingham says nothing of Buddhism, or any non-Western religion. He considers briefly a modern version of the denial of self- hood, which questions the idea that we should aim for narrative unity in our lives. Any such defence of the “episodic” or “happy-go-lucky” life, he tells us, “seems open to a swift and devastating rebuttal: lives of this episodic kind are possible only because others who are not leading happy-go-lucky lives are sustaining the stable relationships that make their easy-come-easy-go attitude possible”. He goes on to observe that advocates of the “episodic” life “tend to be drawn in the end to abandon the very idea of a self persisting over time… Yet the more we think about this, the more it starts to look like a fantasy of evasion.” [...]

The life of Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was both. He writes in his autobiography that when he looked back he found not a single person but something more like a club whose members changed over time. The solitary, rationalistic and rather puritanical self of Russell’s late Victorian youth was not the self that flirted with mysticism as he fell unhappily out of love with his first wife. Nor was it the self that emerged from a spell in prison for pacifist resistance against the First World War, after which his interests shifted from mathematics and logic to politics, and he travelled to Lenin’s Russia and war-torn China. Still less was it the self that married three more times and had countless affairs. Reflecting on his life, Russell found no enduring selfhood. [...]

Even within the Western tradition, as Tom Holland showed in Dominion: the Making of the Western Mind, there are enormous moral gulfs. The Iliad knows nothing of forgiveness, nor does Aristotle’s Ethics of humility. Self-sacrifice figures nowhere in the Epicurean pursuit of tranquil pleasure, nor does concern for the downtrodden and forgotten in Stoicism. Our revulsion at the gladiatorial games of ancient Rome does not come from any inbuilt repugnance at the spectacle of human suffering and violent death. There is no sign that those who watched the games felt any such revulsion. Nor is there much evidence from that era that slavery was felt to be inherently wrong. The repugnance we feel for these practices is an inheritance from Jewish and Christian ideas of human dignity and equality.

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Jacobin Magazine: In Sri Lanka’s Ethnocracy, Tamils Will Always Lose

Tamil families of the disappeared, some of whom last saw their loved ones in one of Gotabaya’s infamous “white vans,” recently marked their one-thousandth day of protest. In Sri Lanka, there are at least 60,000 to 100,000 unresolved cases of enforced disappearances — most of which were perpetrated by the state against Tamils during the final phase of the armed conflict between the state and Tamils. [...]

In a press conference last weekend, a white-van driver spoke plainly of his experience abducting and torturing people during the armed conflict. Without flinching, he explained this was done under the authority of former defense minister and now freshly elected President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. He provided gruesome details of the torture campaign run by Gotabaya — at one particular site in Monaragala, victims’ organs were removed and flung into a nearby reservoir to be fed to crocodiles.[...]

Following the Easter Sunday bombings, in which three churches and three luxury hotels were targeted in attacks by militant Islamists that killed 259 people, Rajapaksa capitalized on the severe failure in state security that led to the worst terror attack this year. He gallantly announced his presidential bid post-attacks and built his campaign around being Sri Lanka’s strongman. His counterpart, Premadasa, was considerably the “lesser evil,” though he too ran on a platform of securitization and bolstering intelligence networks. Neither intended to address the issues of concern to Tamils, including enforced disappearances, military occupation, land grabs, and security sector reform. [...]

This fails to recognize the ferocity with which Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism is protected by the state and the intensity with which it infiltrates its institutions and structures. The constitution itself places Buddhism as having the “first and foremost” place in the country, a testament to the island’s nationalist politics following independence. This analysis further ignores the decade of impunity following the end of the armed conflict that has enabled genocidaires to be treated as “war heroes” and elected to Sri Lanka’s highest office.

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Aeon: We all know that we will die, so why do we struggle to believe it?

Let’s consider the way in which my inevitable death is old news. It stems from the uniquely human capacity to disengage from our actions and commitments, so that each of us can consider him or herself as an inhabitant of the mind-independent world, one human being among billions. When I regard myself ‘from the outside’ in this manner, I have no trouble in affirming that I will die. I understand that I exist because of innumerable contingencies, and that the world will go on without me just as it did before my coming to be. These reflections do not disturb me. My equanimity is due to the fact that, even though I am reflecting on my inevitable annihilation, it is almost as if I am thinking about someone else. That is, the outside view places a cognitive distance between myself as the thinker of these thoughts and myself as their subject. [...]

In order to fully digest the fact of my mortality, I would need to realise, not just intellectually, that my everyday experience is misleading, not in the details, but as a whole. Buddhism can help identify another source of radical distortion. As Jay L Garfield puts it in Engaging Buddhism (2015), we suffer from the ‘primal confusion’ of seeing the world, and ourselves, through the lens of a substance-based metaphysics. For example, I take myself as a self-contained individual with a permanent essence that makes me who I am. This core ‘me-ness’ underpins the constant changes in my physical and mental properties. Garfield is not saying that we all explicitly endorse this position. In fact, speaking for myself, I reject it. Rather, the primal confusion is the product of a non-rational reflex, and typically operates well below the level of conscious awareness. [...]

The Buddhist alternative to a substance-based view of persons is the ‘no-self’ account, which was independently discovered by David Hume. Hume introspected only a constantly shifting array of thoughts, feelings and sensations. He took the absence of evidence of a substantial self to be evidence of its absence, and concluded in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) that the notion of a ‘self’ is merely a convenient device for referring to a causally linked network of mental states, rather than something distinct from them.

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Wisecrack Edition: MINDFULNESS: Is It Deep or Dumb?

Lately, it seems like everybody's practicing mindfulness to combat the stresses of everyday life. But is this modern adaptation of Buddhist tradition spiritually enlightening, or just an excuse to be extra self-involved? Let's find out in this Wisecrack Edition on Mindfulness: Is It Deep or Dumb?

The Art of Manliness: Life Hacking, A Reexamination

In an effort to get more done and be our best selves, many of us have turned to “life hacks” that we find in blogs, books, and podcasts. I’ve personally experimented with several life hacks in the past decade, and we’ve even written about some on AoM. But are there downsides to trying to hack your way through life?

My guest took a look at both the positives and negatives of life hacking in his book, Hacking Life: Systemized Living and Its Discontents. His name is Joseph Reagle, and he’s a professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. We begin our conversation with a history of the life hacking movement and how blogging in the early 2000s made this obscure cultural movement amongst computer programmers go mainstream. Joseph then discusses how he distinguishes between “nominal life hacking” and “optimal life hacking” and between “geeks” and “gurus.” We then discuss some of the beneficial productivity and motivation hacks out there, but also how there are ways they can go astray — including only working for a certain class of people and becoming too much of a focus in life. We also discuss how the minimalism movement can sometimes lead to contradictory impulses, and end our conversation talking about how using spiritual practices like meditation or Stoicism as hacks can strip them of their deeper contexts.

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Aeon: Marxism and Buddhism

At least since Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, commented on his Marxist inclination in 1993, it is evident that Buddhism and Marxism have something in common:

Of all the modern economic theories, the economic system of Marxism is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned only with gain and profitability … The failure of the regime in the former Soviet Union was, for me, not the failure of Marxism but the failure of totalitarianism. For this reason, I still think of myself as half-Marxist, half-Buddhist. [...]

From a Buddhist perspective, the capitalist motor is fuelled by humankind’s deepest vice: its trṣṇa. Marx understood that the whole economic system is based on consumption, and marketing agencies know how to push trṣṇa to the realms of utter perversion, thereby warranting a continuum of consumption and labour. The worker is the hamster, consumer culture is the hamster wheel. People are tricked into believing that Furbies, iPads and all those other pointless goods and services are necessary for a happy and fulfilled existence. A sense of ‘meaning’ has been replaced with instant, short-term, on-demand happiness. [...]

If something is empty of substance, then it is relations that define the thing. In other words, everything is what it is in virtue of bearing certain relations to other things and, as those things are related to other things, ultimately in virtue of bearing relations to everything else. Everything stands in a unique set of relations to other things, which thereby individuates it without its having to assume a unique and individual substance. You stand in countless relations to your parents, spouse, but also to your car and bank account. The impression that there are such things as houses, selves, spouses, bank accounts, hammers and so on, all independent of a network of relations, is actually a conceptual illusion. This, in short, is the Buddhist notion of emptiness. The notion of emptiness includes the notion of self. The self, too, is empty in that it is exclusively defined by its relations, not some underlying substance. This is the idea of no-self.

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Reuters: Wahhabism confronted: Sri Lanka curbs Saudi influence after bombings

Sri Lanka has since arrested a Wahhabi scholar and is poised to take over a Saudi-funded school. The government also says it will monitor previously unchecked money flows from donors including prominent Saudi families to mosques on the Indian Ocean island. [...]

Saudi Arabia rejects the idea that Wahhabism is problematic and defends its record by pointing to the detention of thousands of suspected militants. Riyadh in June sent back five Sri Lankans allegedly linked to the Easter attacks. [...]

The monks, who are influential on the island where 70 percent of the population are Buddhists, and some members of parliament say Hizbullah’s links to Riyadh contributed to the spread of militancy in his native Kattankudy, a Muslim-majority town.

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Aeon: Against cheerfulness

The Ancient Greeks named four virtues: temperance, wisdom, courage and justice. Aristotle added more, but cheerfulness wasn’t one of them. The Greek philosophers didn’t seem to care about how we felt compared with how we acted. Aristotle said that we would ideally feel good while acting good, but he didn’t consider pleasure necessary for beautiful action. Acting virtuously meant steering clear of excess and deficiency. But in order to reach his ‘mean’, we need to jettison every action that misses the mark. Most of the time, the mean is incredibly tough to find, but if it came down to a choice between feeling good while acting badly or feeling badly while acting good, Aristotle said to choose good behaviour. He understood that feelings are hard to control, sometimes impossible, but he also knew that positive feelings like to hang around virtuous actions. While we’re waiting for the good feelings to show up, he asked us to get to work on temperance, wisdom, courage and justice. But he never said anything about smiling through it. [...]

To the Stoic list of virtues, the Christians added faith, hope and love. These are a gift from God, unlike patience and justice, which can be achieved on our own. Faith is the belief that with God all things are possible; hope is risking that belief in real time; and love is willing to be wrong about it. These three add an undeniably emotional element to the mix of virtues, but even Jesus didn’t ask for cheer. The closest he got was telling the disciples not to look depressed when they fasted. Paul got even closer when he declared that ‘God loves a cheerful giver’. But the original Greek still sounds more like ‘God loves it when you give without needing to be persuaded’ than like the Boy Scout definition of cheerfulness. But Paul also said that Christians should ‘do everything without grumbling and arguing’. The pivot from action to attitude started by the Stoics and egged on by the Christians set the historical stage for Scout Law in the US. [...]

It’s no surprise that cheerfulness was embraced not only by Boy Scouts but by the greater American culture too: the US is a melting pot of Christianity, Stoicism, cognitive behavioural therapy, capitalism and Buddhism, all of which hold, to varying degrees, that we are responsible for our attitudes and, ultimately, for our happiness. A quick browse through the self-help section of any US bookstore announces that lots of Americans are desperate to bootstrap their way to the bright side. Texts on embracing life’s miserable condition don’t exactly fly off the shelves. However, books on how optimism can be learned make millionaires out of their authors. They tell us that the key to happiness is positivity, and that the key to positivity is cheerfulness. The aorta of the US economy pumps out optimism, positivity and cheerfulness while various veins carry back US dollars naively invested in schemes designed to get rich quick, emotionally speaking. [...]

There is a fundamental difference between practising the Greek virtues of patience, justice or courage, and practising the American virtue of cheerfulness, which borders on psychosis. Patience asks us to change our behaviour, but it neither asks us to feel differently nor to pretend to feel differently. Granted, Aristotle believed that practising patience over a length of time would naturally make us more patient, but pretence was never part of the deal. You can act patient while feeling impatient, and it’s no lie. But when you fake cheerfulness, you are telling someone else that you feel fine when you don’t. This encourages the most maddening American T-shirts and aprons that say: ‘Smile! Happiness looks gorgeous on you!’

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Quartz: The ancient connections between atheism, Buddhism and Hinduism

As a scholar of Asian religions, however, I’m often struck by the prevalence of atheism and agnosticism—the view that it is impossible to know whether a god exists—in ancient Asian texts. Atheistic traditions have played a significant part in Asian cultures for millennia. [...]

The Buddha himself rejected the idea of a creator god, and Buddhist philosophers have even argued that belief in an eternal god is nothing but a distraction for humans seeking enlightenment. [...]

According to Jainism, the universe is eternal, and while gods may exist, they too must be reborn, just like humans are. The gods play no role in spiritual liberation and enlightenment; humans must find their own path to enlightenment with the help of wise human teachers. [...]

Around the same time when Buddhism and Jainism arose in the sixth century BC, there was also an explicitly atheist school of thought in India called the Carvaka school. Although none of their original texts have survived, Buddhist and Hindu authors describe the Carvakas as firm atheists who believed that nothing existed beyond the material world. [...]

Another example is the Mimamsa school. This school also rejects the idea of a creator God. The Mimamsa philosopher Kumarila said that if a god had created the world by himself in the beginning, how could anyone else possibly confirm it? Kumarila further argued that if a merciful god had created the world, it could not have been as full of suffering as it is.

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The Atlantic: Photos: The 15 Tallest Statues in the World

With the unveiling of the Statue of Unity in India today, there is a new name topping the list of the tallest statues in the world. The new monument to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel stands 597 feet (182 meters) tall, overtaking the previous record holder, the 420-foot (128-meter) Spring Temple Buddha, in China’s Lushan County. Using Wikipedia’s standard of measuring to “the highest part of the human (or animal) figure, but excluding the height of any pedestal,” we present images below of the 15 tallest statues in the world as of today, plus five bonus photos of some more famous—if smaller—colossal monuments.

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Ministry of Ideas: Spiritual Machines

Every culture has had a teleological vision that gives purpose and meaning to our lives, but is the transhumanist vision the one we want?

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Ministry Of Ideas: Nothing Matters

Between the Buddhist doctrine of ‘emptiness,’ the Jewish idea of Ayin, and the invention of numerical zero, it turns out there’s quite a lot to be said about Nothing.

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Aeon: Meditation under the microscope

Such a useful activity naturally finds a variety of applications. Meditation techniques have been deployed in the military with the aim of increasing the wellbeing and work effectiveness of soldiers. Snipers are known to meditate in order to disengage emotionally from the act of killing, to steady the hand that takes a life (the element of peacefulness associated with meditation having been rather set aside). Corporations counteract stress and burnout with meditation which, on the surface, is an amiable aim, but it can also help create compliant workers. And in schools, meditation interventions aim to calm children’s minds, offering students the ability to better deal with the pressure of attaining high grades. Here, too, the goal is to reduce misbehaviour and aggression in a bid to increase prosociality and compliance. [...]

Initially, the results were promising. Our meta-analysis indicated that meditation did indeed have a positive, though moderate, impact on prosociality. But digging deeper, the picture became more complicated. While meditation made people feel somewhat more compassionate or empathetic, it did not reduce aggression or prejudice, nor did it improve how socially connected one felt. So the prosocial benefits are not straightforward, but they are apparently measurable. The issue is the way in which those benefits were measured. [...]

Confirmation bias is difficult to overcome. Journals rely on reviewers to spot them, but because some of these biases have become standard practice (through the reporting of marginally significant effects, say) they often slip through. Reviewers and authors also face academic pressures that make these biases more likely since journals favour the reporting of positive results. But in the study of meditation there is another complication: many of the researchers, and therefore the reviewers of journal articles, are personally invested in meditation not only as practitioners and enthusiasts but also as providers of meditation programmes from which their institutions or themselves financially profit. The overly positive view of meditation and the fierce fight to protect its untarnished reputation make it harder to publish negative results.

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Pew Research Center: The Age Gap in Religion Around the World

On the other hand, in sub-Saharan Africa, where overall levels of religious commitment are among the highest in the world, there is no significant difference between older and younger adults in terms of the importance of religion in 17 out of 21 countries surveyed.

Age gaps are also more common within some religious groups than in others. For example, religion is less important to younger Christian adults in nearly half of all the countries around the world where sample sizes are large enough to allow age comparisons among Christians (37 out of 78). For Muslims, this is the case in about one-quarter of countries surveyed (10 out of 42). Among Buddhists, younger adults are significantly less religious in just one country (the United States) out of five countries for which data are available. There is no age gap by this measure among Jews in the U.S. or Israel, or among Hindus in the U.S. or India.[...]

These explanations are not mutually exclusive – it is possible that young people will become more religious as they age, but will still be less religious than previous generations if their countries become more affluent and stable. Pew Research Center surveys and other international data provide some evidence for both societal and life-course influences on religious commitment. [...]

This has led many researchers to observe that people in poorer parts of the world are, on average, more religious than those in societies with advanced economies.3 Other indicators of economic development – such as education, life expectancy and income equality – also tend to align with measures of religious commitment. [...]

Research has shown that religious attachments tend to peak during adolescence, decline through young and middle adulthood, and then increase through most of late adulthood. For instance, Pew Research Center’s analysis of Gallup poll data suggests that U.S. adults born in the 1930s attended worship more frequently once they reached their 60s. Other longitudinal studies (which surveyed the same people at intervals over decades) find a “retirement surge” in religiosity among older people. While not ruling out the influence of other factors – such as when and where people live – one research team argued that “life course trajectories may trump generational placement as predictors of religious behaviors and orientations.” [...]

Overall, in the average country surveyed, 54% of adults say religion is very important in their lives. However, levels of religious commitment vary widely around the world, as well as between countries within the same geographic area. In the Asia-Pacific region, for instance, the share of those who say religion is very important in their daily lives is highest in Muslim-majority countries such as Pakistan, Indonesia and Afghanistan; in these countries, more than 90% say religion is very important. Meanwhile, Japan (10%) and China (3%), where majorities of the population are religiously unaffiliated, have the lowest shares of people who say this. 

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Quartz: Can there be a “very good dog?” Philosophy has an answer

In other words, Kant didn’t believe a dog like Mu could think or distinguish between bad and good because she isn’t self-aware. For this reason, she is not moral.

This view—which is known as human exceptionalism—persists today. But increasingly philosophers and scientists argue that animals are moral and that we humans may just be insufficiently aware of their inner lives to understand how or why they decide to do what they do. For example, Mark Rowlands, a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, and author of The Philosopher and the Wolf, among other books, believes his dog and wolf are good. [...]

However, because animals may not necessarily be able to scrutinize their behavior—or reflect on the reason they act—he argues in the Philosopher’s Magazine, they cannot be held responsible for their actions even if they are bad. From Rowland’s perspective, they are moral creatures even if they are not rational; in this sense, he is like Zhao Zhou, recognizing their Buddha nature but doubtful of their self-awareness. [...]

Not only that, animals can extend their sense of justice or empathy to other species, not just their own kind. Bekoff wrote a book called Wild Justice with moral philosopher Jessica Pierce, also from the University of Colorado. She told the Telegraph in 2009, “There are cases of dolphins helping humans to escape from sharks and elephants that have helped antelope escape from enclosures. While it is difficult to know for certain that there is cross species empathy, it is hard to argue against it.”

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Jacobin Magazine: The Catastrophe of the Rohingya

In March, the US Holocaust Museum joined several organizations that have taken back humanitarian recognition from Suu Kyi: it revoked its prestigious Elie Wiesel award, stating, “We had hoped that you — as someone we and many others have celebrated for your commitment to human dignity and universal human rights — would have done something to condemn and stop the military’s brutal campaign and to express solidarity with the targeted Rohingya population.” [...]

The UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy on sexual violence Primila Patten of Mauritius has also gone public with her exasperation over Suu Kyi’s refusal to engage substantively on the issue of Burmese military’s systematic sexual violence against literally thousands of Rohingya women and girls – many of whom did not make it to Cox Bazaar’s [in Bangladesh] camps. Suu Kyi should know that inactivity in the face of genocidal actions can carry moral and legal responsibility.” [...]

There are two main reasons behind the genocide: racism and greed. Militant Buddhist groups such as the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party voice the dominant anti-Rohingya sentiment. One of its leaders, U Shwe Mg asserts: “the so-called Rohingya are just illegal immigrants. We allowed them to settle down here because we are generous people and we thought they would just stay a while. But the Bengali had a lot of children, paid Buddhist women to convert to Islam and marry them, stole our land, squeezed our resources, and now they demand equal rights and citizenship. It can’t be.” [...]

Amnesty International has called the system the Rohingya live under “apartheid”: “This system appears designed to make Rohingyas’ lives as hopeless and humiliating as possible.  The security forces’ brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing … is just another manifestation of this appalling attitude.”   [...]

To give a sense of the immensity of this human-made horror, Shirin Ebadi asserted that refugee camps in Syria and Palestine are like “five-star hotels” compared to the refugee sites in Bangladesh.  The present conditions are bad enough, with the monsoon season is fast approaching, disease, hunger, and death will rise exponentially very soon.

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BBC4 Beyond Belief: Transgender

For many years, transgender people have remained silent. But today they are affirming publicly that they have a rightful place in society and religious groups are now grappling with transgender issues. The Church of England General Synod recently debated a motion to draw up a prayer to welcome people who have transitioned from one sex to another. The House of Bishops turned it down.

The Bible asserts that God made mankind in his own image; so what's the problem? Presumably he made people whose gender does not sit comfortably with the sex they were assigned at birth? But debate still rages within the church because the Bible also says that "male and female, God created them" which suggests that there should be no ambiguity when it comes to a person's gender.

The issues are complex and they can multiply if a trans person is living a religious life within a religious community. What is the attitude of religious traditions towards transgender people? Are the problems more cultural than religious?

Joining Ernie Rea are Kamalanandi, and Philippa Whittaker, A Buddhist and a Christian who have both transitioned. With them in discussion is the academic Dr Susannah Cornwall whose work concentrates on contextual theologies, particularly those relating to sex gender and sexuality.

Ernie also talks to Indian transgender activist Vyjayanti Vasanta Mogli about the role that the Hijra play within the Hindu community in India. The Hijra are transgender people who are invited to bless new born babies and married couples but they find themselves outcast within Indian society despite a change in the law in 2014 which recognises their right to be who they are.

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Vox: What the living can learn from the dying

Facing death is considered fundamental in the Buddhist tradition. Death is seen as a final stage of growth. Our daily practices of mindfulness and compassion cultivate the wholesome mental, emotional, and physical qualities that prepare us to meet the inevitable. [...]

I think death is completely unmanageable. Medicine puts a lot of effort into trying to manage this experience, which is too big in a way, too profound for medicine. I think what we do is we help people do the normal things that any other hospice would do. That is, make sure that their pain is well managed, that their symptoms are under control, that they’re not suffering.  [...]

The second is that I think that when we begin to keep death close at hand, we understand just how precarious this life actually is. And when we see that ... then we come to see just how precious it is, and then we don’t want to waste a moment. Then we want to jump into our life. We want to tell the people we love that we love them. We want to live our life in a way that's responsible, meaningful, purposeful. [...]

Death is a mystery, and people who are dying are turning toward mystery, and mystery is this unknowable territory, the land of unanswerable questions. To be a good companion, I have to be comfortable in that territory of mystery as well, and that doesn’t mean that I have all the answers. It means that I’m willing to stay in the room when the going gets tough. That I don’t turn away from the unknown, that I enter with a quality of curiosity and wonder.

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