As a group, mammals average a lethal violence rate against their own of about three killings of their own species in 1,000 deaths. The “root” violence rate of early humans and many of our closer primate cousins is about 20 in 1,000… But in the medieval period, between 700 and 1500 A.D., that deadly rate shot up to about 120 per 1,000.
On average, modern humans now kill each on a rate of 13 in 1,000, Gomez said, basing his calculations on World Health Organization data. But he says the exact numbers are rough and depend on many technical variables, so what is more accurate is to say “violence has decreased significantly in the contemporary age.”
“It seems that we are in the present time less violent than we were in the past,” Gomez said in an email interview.
Looking at the evolutionary tree, they note that “the large grouping called Euarchonta that includes us, other primates, tree shrews and flying lemurs has a rate of about 23 per 1,000” and “It drops to about 18 for great apes.”
That means we might also be the most peaceful of our local evolutionary cousins. Or perhaps not. They didn’t mention Bonobos, aka the “hippy chimps.” According to LiveScience, these guys and gals have a high level of a thyroid hormone (T3) that helps keep aggression in check.
In the below Scientific American article, it is noted that “Juvenile bonobos are incurably playful and like to make funny faces, sometimes in long solitary pantomimes and at other times while tickling one another. Bonobos are, however, more controlled in expressing their emotions–whether it be joy, sorrow, excitement or anger–than are the extroverted chimpanzees.” They are incurably playful but emotionally controlled, an amazing combination, and one no doubt many humans could benefit from emulating.
Humans share 98.7 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, but we share one important similarity with one species of chimp, the common chimpanzee, that we don’t share with the other, the bonobo. That similarity is violence. While humans and the common chimpanzee wage war and kill each other, bonobos do not. “There has never been a recorded case in captivity or in the wild of a bonobo killing another bonobo,” notes anthropologist Brian Hare.
This raises not only important moral questions about what we are capable of as a species, but also societal questions about dealing with people who are immoral and have depressed thyroid hormones. Or, for that matter, any number of hormones and/or neurotransmitters seen to be important in our lives as healthy, functioning members of society. It may help us better understand those people and thus feel deeper compassion for them rather than labeling them and casting them out. Studies like this may also help identify physical sources of immoral activity (and/or uncontrolled emotions) in humans to aid in treatment and understanding.
We live at the apex of a long era of revolutionary change, with deep roots in history. This change has accelerated over the past centuries due to the technologies gained from empirical and scientific investigation.
Our change stems from a process of increasing knowledge of our world, leading to an increasing effectiveness with which we manipulate it to suit our wishes. Perhaps the biggest evidence of this change is the precipitous growth in human population, life expectancy, and per capita income following the Age of Enlightenment.
Economist Angus Maddison has estimated that per capita income did not grow markedly until around 1820 due to the “recognition of human capacity to transform the forces of nature through rational investigation and experiment”; that is, “experimental science”.
Another way to understand this growth is in terms of the efficiency of production. As economist Paul Krugman (1997:11) put it,
Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything. A country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker.
Improving productivity comes down to making technological advancements such that work that used to be done by two can now be done by one. Advancements flourished during the industrial revolution, with inventions such as the steam engine, machines for textile production, food production, transportation, and so on. Then research into the physics of electromagnetism in the 19th century led to the availability of distributed electric power in the 20th.
Recently we have seen what futurist Jim Carroll terms an “exponential growth” of knowledge. He points to recent advances in genetics and renewable energy among other things. This growth stems crucially from “Moore’s Law”, the regularity first remarked on by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore back in 1965, that the number of transistors on a computer chip doubles roughly every eighteen months. This regularity has persisted for over fifty years up to the present day, and is the basis for the exponential growth in computing power over our lifetimes, itself a catalyst for knowledge.
Improvement in transistor density is due to continual improvements in the performance of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, where photolithographers learn to use smaller wavelengths of light accurately to transfer more compact circuit diagrams onto wafers of silicon. (Van Zant 1997:11). Newest equipment works with light in the extreme-ultraviolet range, and research continues into X-ray lithography.
Much of the work in this field is on the bleeding edge of scientific and technical knowledge, and yet its success is the basis of all modern computing, from digital audio and video to computers and cellphones to the internet itself. It is also partly the basis for the rapid decline in solar photovoltaic system costs. (Taylor 2015:80).
Our rapidly increasing knowledge leads to an accelerating increase in impact: not only are we becoming more powerful as a species, each of us is individually becoming more powerful as we gain mastery over greater technologies. This may not be obvious at a glance, but think of the impact a single person could have nowadays with a gun, car, or explosive, much less an airplane. A person in ancient Rome had recourse to little besides a sword.
As methods for formulating and producing nanomaterials, including genetic materials, become more widespread, and as costs and complexities decrease, methods for the production of good and ill will become available to more. Performance and pricing of DNA sequencing technologies has followed a so-called “Carlson Curve”, much akin to the exponential Moore’s Law.
One does not need to believe in a “technological singularity” to see that this is a chaotic and potent process: each individual will be able to make a larger and larger impact.
Bill Joy, technologist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, crystallized the problem back in 2000 when he discussed some potential dangers of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics in particular:
Together they could significantly extend our average life span and improve the quality of our lives. Yet, with each of these technologies, a sequence of small, individually sensible advances leads to an accumulation of great power and, concomitantly, great danger.
What was different in the 20th century? Certainly, the technologies underlying the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) – nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) – were powerful, and the weapons an enormous threat. But building nuclear weapons required, at least for a time, access to both rare – indeed, effectively unavailable – raw materials and highly protected information; biological and chemical weapons programs also tended to require large-scale activities.
The 21st-century technologies – genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) – are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them.
One may debate the extent to which Joy was right in worrying about these developments in particular, or about how long the dangers might take to materialize. In a 2008 update, Lucas Graves noted that doom had not yet descended upon us. And in their response to Joy’s article, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid wrote that social factors (such as Joy’s own input) will intervene to mitigate any great damage from such technologies.
Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is evidence enough however that human power and productivity has a potentially terminal downside. The role of a handful of oil barons in bankrolling anti-AGW propaganda shows how powerful and effective wealthy individuals can be.
Generally speaking, biological exponential growth tends to fall afoul of the Malthusian catastrophe when resources are exhausted. Any exponential growth is eventually unsustainable, and as they say, what is unsustainable will not be sustained, one way or another.
One tempting answer is to say that what is needed is more knowledge, better technologies. And surely that is not wrong. More knowledge about the effects of global warming might, for example, convince more people that it is real and that it might be uncomfortable. More research into methods of counteracting its effects, scrubbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, or other “hail-Mary”-type geoengineering projects might collectively make a difference in the medium to longer term.
But even so the basic problem will remain: we are individually and collectively becoming more powerful, by harnessing ever greater sources of knowledge. As technologies become more potent and available, their potential for mischief becomes greater.
The Problem: Knowledge and Wisdom
It isn’t so much that we need more knowledge, it’s that we need the right kind of knowledge. We need to be able to distinguish what is important from what is unimportant, skillful from unskillful, right from wrong, good from bad. That is, we need ethical knowledge, as part of the social factors that can influence technology development and adaptation for the better.
Now, it may be said that ethical knowledge isn’t the thing that can be taught or learned. It’s the sort of thing we either know without learning, or the sort of thing we effortlessly rationalize away. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, following David Hume, has claimed that moral emotions and intuitions drive moral reasoning rather than the reverse. That is, when we look to decide what is important, skillful, right, and good, we look to our emotional responses to things. If some state of affairs elicits a positive emotional response, we take that as evidence that the thing is good; if negative, we take it as evidence that the thing is bad. Then we confabulate reasons for our subsequent moral choices.
While this does not quite establish that ethical claims are irretrievably matters of personal whim, at least it tells us they are epistemically problematic. And this matters, for in many cases involving basic human emotions such as greed and hatred, our emotional response may, at least arguably, get the moral facts entirely backward. For example, we typically decide that what is important, right, and good is that we accumulate as much as we can. (Greed). We typically decide that what is important, right, and good is that those people whom we dislike end up suffering. (Hatred). Indeed, we typically act to fulfill those very ends.
This picture of our ordinary way of thinking and acting fits precisely with the Buddha’s picture of the untutored mind:
[A]n untaught ordinary person … does not understand what things are fit for attention and what things are unfit for attention. Since it is so, he attends to those things unfit for attention and he does not attend to those things fit for attention.
What are the things unfit for attention that he attends to? They are things such that when he attends to them, the unarisen taint of sensual desire arises in him and the arisen taint of sensual desire increases … And what are the things fit for attention that he does not attend to? They are things such that when he attends to them, the unarisen taint of sensual desire does not arise in him and the arisen taint of sensual desire is abandoned … (Majjhima Nikāya 2.5-6).
“Sensual desire” covers both our positive reaction to pleasant sensations (greed) and our negative reaction to unpleasant sensations (hatred). Or in other words, the untaught ordinary person takes those things to be most important which produce pleasant sensations and eradicate unpleasant ones. His ethical system, such as it is, revolves around the notion that what is important, skillful, right, and good is what feels pleasant to him right now.
Such an ethical approach necessarily leads to egoistic short-term thinking. It is unpleasant right now to undertake campaigns to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Those in positions of wealth and power, following the ethical program of the untaught, feel anger toward those things that are unpleasant to them, so they strive to eradicate anti-AGW programs. So too with issues of higher taxation: those of greater wealth gain pleasure by seeing the increase in their accounts. The idea that such an increase might be limited by taxation is unpleasant to them, which causes anger. They strive to eradicate the cause of their anger, so they fund efforts to end programs to raise their taxes.
At base this is an issue of getting the ethics right: of understanding “what things are fit for attention and what things are unfit for attention”, or in other words what is important and unimportant, skillful and unskillful, and so on.
It is an issue of gaining wisdom. Wisdom is not simply knowledge; it is not simply the gathering of facts. It is knowing which facts are important. It is knowing which facts to gather and which facts not to gather, since we have limited time and effort.
The aim of science is to gather knowledge. While knowledge is indispensable for wisdom (ignorant wisdom is an oxymoron), science alone cannot tell us what is important. We need wise understanding to guide us.
Learned Wisdom
The question is whether wisdom can be learned, or whether we are doomed to ignorance. This is not an idle question; on it may depend our future. As the amassing of scientific knowledge accelerates, so too does human power, for good and ill. If wisdom cannot be learned, then we will tend instead towards our unlearned, ordinary ways of thinking and behaving.
In his recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker presents data that violence has declined markedly over the past several centuries. He also argues that recent declines are due to the integration of Enlightenment ideals such as tolerance and human rights. If Pinker is correct, and his data is persuasive, it provides some substantial indirect evidence that wisdom may be taught and learned, even on a broad social level.
If wisdom can be learned, it probably cannot be learned by everyone, or under all conditions. One needs to be open to it, perhaps psychologically close enough to it in Haidt’s sense, in order to learn; and even then, learning may be slow.
So-called “Dark Buddhism” notwithstanding, I doubt there are many people who will go from Ayn Randian selfishness to selfless generosity and compassion. What is more likely is that we will understand an ethical position cognitively, assent to it as an abstract proposition, but find ourselves unable to live up to it in practice. In the West this is known as “weakness of the will”, in Buddhism “wrong intention”. If we can at least notice such wrong intention when it arises and strive to change, it may not be much, but it isn’t nothing either. It’s a start.
This isn’t so much a matter of learning to vote a certain way, or that global warming is harmful. In practice it may tend rather to amount to our learning to become less possessive, less greedy, less angry, less neurotic, less upset. These too are ethical issues insofar as they impact ourselves and others for good or ill. It may seem there is a vast chasm between a few people learning to be less angry and our being able as a species to deal with the accelerating power that information provides us, but change begins in small ways on a personal level.
If as the Buddha says in the Dhammapada,
Hatred never ends through hatred.
By non-hate alone does it end.
This is an ancient truth. (Dhp. 5)
then we must learn somehow to live through non-hate, difficult though that may be to our untaught, ordinary minds.
The scientific jury is still out on the extent to which any given practices can moderate greed, hatred, and other harmful emotions. However it is under active study. For example, psychologist and neuroscientist Kent Berridge and others are working on the neurological origins of desire and craving. Discussing this work, Peter Whybrow, director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience at UCLA, laments that in some of our contemporary social norms,
We have yoked fundamental biology, putting wanting, liking and reward
together into a cultural vision of what is progress. We’ve forgotten how you constrain desire.
Berridge is pursuing techniques of meditation to aid in mitigating addiction, the deepest form of desire. This is only one of many parallel streams of investigation looking into the potential relation of meditative practice to emotional change. It is early days yet, and although data is promising it is far from complete.
Buddhism and the World
In its fullest elaboration, Buddhism is world-renouncing rather than world-embracing: since saṃsāra is necessarily unsatisfactory, since it is impermanent, suffering, and non-self, it is not something to which we should become attached. This approach has benefits in cultivating a less resource-intensive lifestyle: as we learn to renounce, we learn to need less. We learn benefits of non-acquisition that may counter our ordinary impulse to acquire.
However renunciation can also lead to a measure of what might be termed disengagement from issues of social and political justice, and might equally lead to disengagement from the technological issues already outlined. The danger is one of meditative practice leading to “narcissistic self-absorption” as Bhikkhu Bodhi puts it. As regards the recent turn towards mindfulness meditation he says,
The great leaders of social transformation, both in theory and action, for the most part do not practice the meditative mode of mindfulness, and the foremost exponents of meditative mindfulness in a Buddhist setting hardly promote large-scale social transformation. Contrast for example the African American Christian clergy involved in human rights campaigns, or the Christian and Jewish clergy who have led the campaigns against US military involvement around the world, with the Buddhist meditation masters. The former, with perhaps a few exceptions, don’t practice meditative mindfulness, while the latter show only a marginal concern with social justice issues.
One might add that there were many secular activists involved in these social campaigns as well. (Jacoby 2004).
There are many confounding variables, involving the causes and conditions in which these various figures arose. One cannot therefore take any grand lessons from Bodhi’s claim, but it should give pause. Meditative insights are not a panacea, and if they are to be best used to social effect nowadays they will most likely have to be modified.
One modification prominent in contemporary Western Buddhism is the heightened prominence given to mettā (loving-kindness) meditation and the other Brahmavihāras, as compared to their relatively marginal role in the Nikāyas. Living in larger and denser communities today, we probably need more focus on kindness and compassion than those living in the scattered rural communities of 2500 years ago.
Another modification will be the integration of social, political, and planetary action into the dhamma, as indeed is manifested in Bhikkhu Bodhi’s own role in founding Buddhist Global Relief.
Those of us involved in the Secular Buddhist enterprise look to promote a secular approach to the dhamma, one more in tune with our contemporary scientific understanding of the world. But focusing on secularism cannot be our only goal.
Conclusion
Accurate information is not enough. Further scientific and technological advances may be necessary to overcoming our present difficulties, but they are far from sufficient if we are to flourish in the longer term. We also need to know how best to use increasing knowledge and power to our common benefit. We need to focus on cultivating wisdom.
In a recent article, economist Jeffrey Sachs argued much the same thing: that “We need both science and morality to reduce the risk to our planet.” Sachs, like biologist EO Wilson, has looked to ally himself with liberal and open-minded religious leaders, as well as those from the secular community of course, in the struggle to help save our planetary heritage. The stakes are too great for us not to put differences aside when our common future is so at risk.
It is essential to work together now. In the medium to longer term, we need to cultivate the acquisition of wisdom so as to stave off the time when our rising influence over the natural world might imperil us all. In his 2000 paper Bill Joy crystallized many of the potential dangers that accelerating technological change might bring. He also sketched out a possible route to betterment, interestingly along Buddhist lines:
Where can we look for a new ethical basis to set our course? I have found the ideas in the book Ethics for the New Millennium, by the Dalai Lama, to be very helpful. As is perhaps well known but little heeded, the Dalai Lama argues that the most important thing is for us to conduct our lives with love and compassion for others, and that our societies need to develop a stronger notion of universal responsibility and of our interdependency; he proposes a standard of positive ethical conduct for individuals and societies …
The Dalai Lama further argues that we must understand what it is that makes people happy, and acknowledge the strong evidence that neither material progress nor the pursuit of the power of knowledge is the key – that there are limits to what science and the scientific pursuit alone can do.
Our Western notion of happiness seems to come from the Greeks, who defined it as “the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope.”
Clearly, we need to find meaningful challenges and sufficient scope in our lives if we are to be happy in whatever is to come. But I believe we must find alternative outlets for our creative forces, beyond the culture of perpetual economic growth; this growth has largely been a blessing for several hundred years, but it has not brought us unalloyed happiness, and we must now choose between the pursuit of unrestricted and undirected growth through science and technology and the clear accompanying dangers.
Scientific and technological growth are inevitable and largely beneficial in any healthy, open, modern society. They are a simple byproduct of people asking questions and looking to improve their lot. Hence we must act in whatever limited ways we can to mitigate their dangers. The ethical and practical guidelines of the Buddhist Path provide one promising method for bending the arc of change towards the skillful.
Lucas Graves, “15th Anniversary: Why the Future Still Needs Us a While Longer”. Wired 16.04, Mar. 2008.
Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment”, Psychological Review 108:4 (2001), 814-834.
Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (Henry Holt, 2004).
Peter Van Zant, Microchip Fabrication, 3rd Ed. (McGraw Hill, 1997).
Doug Smith
Doug has a PhD in Philosophy, with a minor in Buddhist philosophy and Sanskrit. In 2013 he completed the year-long Integrated Study and Practice Program with the BCBS and NYIMC. As a long time scientific skeptic, he pursues a naturalized approach to practice. He is also interested in scholarship about the Tipiṭaka, and the theoretical and historical origins of the dhamma. He writes for the Secular Buddhist Association, where he is also blogging director.
As we pause on this day to reflect on the life and vision of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. it’s easy to throw our hands up and admit defeat. Black men and boys are being killed by their neighbors and police with impunity, Muslims in the West face increasing scrutiny and bigotry, governments continue to ignore the wrongs of their nations past – and present – toward indigenous peoples, the latest boom in the economy seems to be just numbers on a screen for most Americans as 95% of recent income gains went to the richest 1%, and scientists now say that global warming will trigger a mass extinction of animals and this along with other human-caused destruction could lead to an earth that cannot support humanity as it does today.
Despite all of this, anyone who knows me knows that I’m an optimist about humanity. Do a quick search of this blog for “Pinker” and you’ll find some of my writings about recent work in optimism regarding humanity from a social scientific perspective. But my optimism goes back well before my familiarity with Steven Pinker, back to the tradition of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who is mentioned in the video below by Michael Shermer in his interview with fellow Patheos blogger Ryan Bell as one of the enlightenment thinkers who contributed to “the invention of human rights.”
In two of his essays, “Idea for a Universal History” (1784) and “Conjectural Beginning of Human History” (1786), Kant described the development of reason in human history as a gradual process, borne of instrumental use (in the service of satisfying basic needs), growing into antagonistic tensions, what Kant calls unsocial-sociability, in which people further developed their reason in competition with one another, and steadily building toward the kind of reason in which one might find it possible to follow the dictates of the Categorical Imperative: to truly treat all others as ends in themselves, to see the common humanity in all people. Kant even thought that our failings, our wars, our strife, and our struggles would further urge on the development of our rational nature, forcing us to learn less destructive ways to settle our differences. That tradition passed through people like the Transcendentalist and Universalist minister Theodore Parker, who inspired King’s quote in his fight for the abolition of slavery before the outbreak of the Civil War, saying:
I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight, I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.
That conscience, according to Kant, is the “moral law” within each of us, obscured only by various drives, desires, and inclinations that push and pull us this way and that. For Kant, a religious origin for this conscience was thin, if there at all. And according to Shermer, it was not so much a particular religious ideal that drove King but rather a liberal political idealism. He notes that a major influence on King was Gandhi and that many of the things King fought for were not in the Bible but rather reflected political needs of his day.
As Bell and Shermer further discuss the question of just how history could turn toward justice, the notion of the city-state came up, the idea that real decisions needed to be handled at the most local level possible. It is fitting, as this is just how so many movements in the drive for justice have arisen and found their momentum, and it is how thousands of protesters across the country today are marching, taking back the streets under the banners of #reclaimMLK and #BlackLivesMatter. Watch the video below, find events that are happening or have happened at fergusonaction.com/reclaim-mlk/, and let me know what you think: is the world becoming more just? Is there any such thing as an ‘arc’ to begin with, or is human history just an assemblage of random events pieced together by narratives of our own making?
One of the most astonishing facts of the 21st century is the unprecedented rise in cosmopolitanism. Like never before in human history, each and every one of us is connected, or potentially connected, to literally billions of other people around the planet. We can even get news updates from people living beyond our planet.
It’s very true that poverty, lack of access to health, education, and technology are still major issues for humanity. Violence is still abundant, and with the rise in communication and population, there is no shortage of ‘breaking news’ about the latest tragedy. But it’s better now than it was in the 1980s; and it was better then than it was in the 1950s, which was better than the 1860s, and so on, indefinitely into human history.
Today I sit overlooking a street busy with foot-traffic. I overhear bits of conversations in dozens of languages. I share a living space with people from all corners of the earth. I’m not a rich businessman, I’m not royalty, but I am in touch with the world.
This contact, as Steven Pinker suggests in the video below, brings me face-to-face with the humanity of others in a way that my ancestors could hardly imagine.
And this makes, I would argue, for a necessarily, better, more peaceful world. Yes, there are those who are so racist, fundamentalist, etc-ist, that no amount of conversation or contact with others will break down their biases. And these very same ‘haters’ will tell you that they have met the ‘Other’ – so they know the ‘horrible truth’ of this Other. But even though the hateful are generally the loudest people around, they are also increasingly marginalized.
As many of you know, my work seeks to draw into dialogue some of the great traditions of the West with Buddhism. My current work is on Kant, the great Enlightenment thinker, but I’m also doing some work on a yet-to-be-published paper on Ignatian (Catholic) Spirituality.
Here, in looking broadly at human history, I think Buddhists could learn from Western thinkers.
Though many Western Buddhists are perhaps ignorant of the pessimism found in early texts – texts that speak of an age of decline – they are nonetheless there, and the idea that we are in an age in which awakening is exceptionally difficult exists in traditional Buddhist cultures (I’ve personally heard it expressed by Japanese and Thai Buddhists and read it in Pali suttas. It may be interestingly absent from Tibetan or other forms of Buddhism, but I’m not sure.).
Certainly many Western thinkers had a dismal view of humanity’s future as well: namely an eventual (and sometimes imminent) end of history itself. However, as Europeans became more adventurous, encountering people from around the world, some developed a new view on history, a view that would come to be known as the Age of Enlightenment. Of course this age was utterly disastrous for many of those people that Europeans encountered – we cannot forget that. And we also cannot forget that Asia had already gone through several Ages of Enlightenment, when trade and travel brought distant cultures, ideas, and technologies half-way around the world. I’m being a bit Eurocentric here only to draw attention to Kant (1724 -1804), who lived and wrote in the midst of this European Age of Enlightenment.
Kant was an amazingly cosmopolitan man, who, as it happens, never left his home city. He also expressed many of the prejudices against women and non-Europeans that were common to his time, so we mustn’t idealize his every word or try to make too great a hero out of him (though I suspect this isn’t really a problem). But he did have great hope, sometimes even with the sort of boom and bluster that anyone who has studied Kant would hardly believe came from his hand:
Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! “Have courage to use your own reason!”- that is the motto of enlightenment.
He also wrote a treatise laying out a future that he hoped would lead to Perpetual Peace. His proposals, obviously well ahead of their time, would eventually become realized in the creation of the League of Nations and the United Nations.
One of Kant’s central theses was that each human being has dignity worthy of our respect, a respect that arises out of our sense of morality itself. All other feelings, for Kant, arise out of inclination or fear (in Buddhism, think of greed and aversion). We develop this respect over time, through our encounters with others. The precise details are a bit convoluted (in Kant as in other philosophies/psychologies/etc), but the idea is that at first we see other beings purely in terms of what pleasure they can give us or, alternatively, in terms of the pain they might bring. So we classify people into two simple categories of good and bad. But with a little experience we realize that ‘bad’ people aren’t bad all the time to everyone. To someone else, they are a ‘good’ person.
Seeing this, we see the complexity of other humans. We see, in fact, the amazing complexity that makes them human.
For Kant this is a sort of intuitive ‘ah-ha’ moment.
Today, most people reading this blog are probably fairly morally developed people, so thinking of a person you still think of in purely good (this person gives me stuff/makes me happy) or purely bad terms might be difficult. If that’s the case: good, keep it up. You’re living the enlightenment.
If, on the other hand, you think that all Catholics, Muslims, Jews, or whoever is ‘bad’ (or good, or pick any other group), then you still have work to do. In fact, you’re one of the folks Steven Pinker says we still have to be vigilant about.
The upshot is that as long as you are living and breathing, you still have opportunities to dialogue with these people, and in today’s world more so than ever. In dialogue we learn to see things from the perspective of the ‘Other’ – if we see them as human like us, then we see that we cannot automatically privilege ourselves over them. This is the second of Kant’s three stages in the development of the cosmopolitan human. The first step was to “think for oneself,” breaking free of the bonds of labels, of other people’s judgment and other people’s biases (Kant specifically singles out both religion and politicians as controlling forces that we must break free from). And the third is to think consistently, which is the most difficult, but is also a result of a full development of the previous two.
Kant’s optimism, and mine, is that we are all, collectively and as individuals, moving in this direction. We are breaking down barriers: Muslim and Jew, Gay and Straight, Asian and European, and so on.
In an upcoming post I’ll discuss “breaking down barriers” in Buddhist “cultivation of loving-kindness” practice. This is where I think Western philosophers and religious leaders could, in turn, learn a lot from Buddhism.
* My thinking on dialogue this week comes from a number of places, including great conversations with teachers and fellow students here in the UK. As a case in point of our wonderful, connected age, however, I also owe some of my thought on this to Doug Smith, blogger at the Secular Buddhist Association and his comments at and ‘heads-up’ about Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York’s blog, Rationally Speaking (discussing Buddhism). We all have a great deal to learn from one another, and I can’t help but requote the lines that are at the top of Pigliucci’s blog: a public intellectual … ought to be: someone who devotes himself to “the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them.”
A graph of major wars over the last 500 years (percentage of years in 25-year chunks).
Buddhism has always held that all phenomena are transitory, including both the teaching of Buddhism as we know it and the world itself. While the Dharma -speaking of the Truth he came to understand – is universal, eternal, and uninfluenced by particular human circumstances, the sāsana, or lineage of teachings handed down for the last 2400+ years, will come to an end.
Likewise, Buddhism inherited the cosmology of Proto-Hinduism (Brahmanism), which held that humans today are living in an age of decline. Part of this sense of decline is the belief in growing immorality and warfare. Conversely, the level of emphasis this belief has taken on in Buddhist cultures often reflects a world around them engulfed in war or simply persecution. The belief exists in all schools of Buddhism, though it took on heightened urgency in China. There the idea that the decline would have a phase of “final dharma” (mofa), starting in 552 C.E. was established, and in Japan the same belief, termed mappō was transmitted with the updated start-date of 1052 C.E. *
However, as Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker writes in his new book “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined“, this hasn’t been the case. In fact, things are getting better. His work is largely a tour de force of collected statistics. Take the middle ages for instance. While good records weren’t kept everywhere, from what we do have, it is clear that a lot of people were murdered. Just looking at homicides, Pinker determined that you were 35 times more likely to be murdered in the middle ages than today. 35 times!
Stats for warfare follow as similar trajectory. While warfare, homicide, and other forms of violence obviously do continue, the fact is that, proportional to population, they are declining. It is that “proportional” part that might cause difficulty for many people. Millions of people died violently in the 20th century, more than in any before: doesn’t that make it the most violent century ever? In just raw numbers, yes. But in terms of any individual’s likelihood of dying violently, no.
As Colbert quips in the clip below: if you kill 1 million people in nation that has 2 million, that’s pretty bad, but if you kill 1 million people in a nation that has 40 million, that’s progress?
While there is plenty of anecdotal evidence of continued antagonisms around the world, this doesn’t refute the statistics, which – as a bit of a math nerd – I feel are both incredibly important and widely overlooked by most people. One unfortunate, but common, side effect of citing anecdotes is the tit-for-tat kind of arguments that Kaplan has at one point with a gentleman who lived in Singapore in the 1960s and 70s. The power, and for me, beauty of these wide-scale statistical views is the fact that you can swallow up anecdotes: sure, there is war, but look at how much less there is now vs the past.
But people like stories, now as much as before. The interesting thing about stories is that they can compel people to do things in a way that statistics never could. The Buddhist stories of decline were probably meant as moral exhortations, saying: “look at yourselves. The world could be so much better and, in fact, it once was. Let me tell you about it…” When we look at these stories we cannot lose sight of this moral lesson. Today people just read the stories as if they were fanciful fairy-tales conceived in a pre-scientific age. As if people 2500 years ago (and this goes for Biblical stories as well) couldn’t count up to 100, so they believed some people could live to 200, 1000, or older. Of course this is often a reaction to meeting people (we tend to call them fundamentalists in the West and traditionalists in the East) who do actually believe the stories on face value. What we need is a middle ground. Something solid. Statistics. (And graphs.)
I’ve been back at work on my phd thesis on Kant and Buddhist ethics and also having many wonderful conversations with fellow scholars and friends regarding a wide range of topics in academia, philosophy, and history. The mental stimulation has been most welcome, and I look forward to its continuing for many months to come.
One of the topics of discussion has somewhat steered around the above topics of Modernism, Optimism, and Naivety. Let me explain, briefly, what I mean by each of these. Modernism (in philosophy) is an idea or movement in philosophy which embraces the ideas of human rationality, the power of empirical investigation, and, amongst some at least, moral progress. It’s a contentious topic, and not very well defined. Optimism is an aspect of some Modern philosophy; certainly in Kant and his successor Hegel. Marx, too, had optimism – in his case that capitalism had within it the causes of its own destruction. Today optimism and belief in human rationality might seem rare, but thinkers like Habermas still cling to the possibilities of improving society through reasoned discourse.
Naivety is the charge pressed against Modernists. ‘Look at Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot; there is no progress.’ As Adorno famously stated, ‘No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the atom bomb’ (Negative Dialectics).
But a recent book by Steven Pinker suggests otherwise.
Drawing on the work of the archaeologist Lawrence Keeley, Pinker recently concluded that the chance of our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors meeting a bloody end was somewhere between 15% and 60%. In the 20th century, which included two world wars and the mass killers Stalin and Hitler, the likelihood of a European or American dying a violent death was less than 1%.
Pinker shows that, with notable exceptions, the long-term trend for murder and violence has been going down since humans first developed agriculture 10,000 years ago. And it has dropped steeply since the Middle Ages. It may come as a surprise to fans of Inspector Morse but Oxford in the 1300s, Pinker tells us, was 110 times more murderous than it is today. With a nod to the German sociologist Norbert Elias, Pinker calls this movement away from killing the “civilising process”.
Counter arguments and anecdotal evidence against Pinker’s claims may be found. Perhaps the pessimist will point to the abundance of cancer, heart disease, and depression in the contemporary world. Perhaps we’re not stabbing and shooting each other as in the past, but we still seem to be killing one another and ourselves through stress and other non-physical violence.
But the optimist in me says we can overcome these as well. And the modernist sees that in many ways, we are.
Let me close by offering just a few speculative notes on postmodernism, positivism, and my current modernist optimism. I won’t bother to define these beyond what you can find in the first few lines of the wikipedia articles on them.
It has occurred to me that the great problem of modern philosophy may be nothing of its own making, but rather the fact that it was hijacked by positivists. Postmodernism, if that is the case, might be not a rejection of modern philosophy itself, but rather of positivism – a rather fanatical version of modern philosophy. When I tell people I study Buddhism, they usually perk up. When I say I’m comparing Buddhism to Immanuel Kant, they usually scour and ask why. Most have received the standard basic education on Kant, which is, very sadly, misleading. Here’s a snippit from a recent book review:
In Part One, Louden argues against the stereotype (still too common, even amongst philosophers who should know better) of Kant as a stern imposer of exceptionless moral rules, the very paradigm of a rigid deontologist who ignores the rich heritage of the ethics of virtue bequeathed to us by the classical philosophers and their Christian successors.
Unfortunately, the naivety seems to be in the hands (and heads) of people who blithely call Kant and fellow Modernists ‘naive’. But my sense is that it’s not really their fault. They were given a misrepresentation of Kant by an authority figure they trusted, who in turn probably learned it from a similarly misguided philosopher, who, perhaps, was simply caught up in the wave of positivist euphoria of the early 20th century.
Rereading Kant and other Modern philosophers may then get us back to the reality of their lives and thought, and indeed back to the optimism of their world, an optimism which still dangles, by a thread, in ours.
American Buddhist Perspectives
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