Self-reliance means being helpless
There is a persistent funny form of suspicion in most of us that we can solve our own problems and be the masters of our own ships of life, but the fact of the matter is that by ourselves we can only be consumed by our problems and suffer the shipwreck.
—Harry Stack Sullivan (February 21, 1892–January 14, 1949)
Like most high-school students in in the early 1960s, I had an assignment to read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay called “Self-reliance.” So much time has passed since then that I no longer recall what impression that essay made on me, aside from recalling what is perhaps the best-known quotation from that essay: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” That’s as much of the quotation as I have remembered for most of my life. The passage in which it occurs provides more context:
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
Over the decades I have encountered several people who took false comfort in the last line of that passage by reasoning, fallaciously, that if to be great is to be misunderstood, then to be misunderstood is to be great. Such people usually assure themselves, without evidence, that they are misunderstood.
As much as I admire Emerson’s writing style—what writer has not wished he or she could have written any number of Emerson’s beautifully crafted sentences?—being little-minded as I am, I find myself in fundamental disagreement with not only that famous quotation but also with the very idea of self-reliance.
Emerson wrote “Self-reliance” in 1841, a time when many Americans were caught up in the myth of self-reliance and staunch individualism. That myth became especially strong after the Civil War as people of European descent became preoccupied with colonizing the American West by wresting lands away from Native Americans and imposing their values upon the peoples who had lived there for millennia. The romantic heroes of that mythology were the pioneers and the cowboys. According to that fanciful narrative, the pioneers and cowboys were independent-minded freedom-loving white men, and their obedient women, whose sole desire was to be left alone, especially by anything resembling Government. That mythology is still alive among many Americans who show their self-reliant individualism by driving pickup trucks and wearing cowboy hats, even if they are bankers or real-estate agents living in downtown Denver or Phoenix. To prove one’s rugged individualism, it is important to dress and behave and talk like all the other rugged individualists in one’s neighborhood.
As an aside, I should make it clear that although I went to high school in a suburb of Denver, I never wore cowboy boots until I went to college in Wisconsin and had to prove to those midwesterners that I was a true son of the Wild West. During my high school years I was in hot pursuit of a different fantasy, namely, that I was a beatnik, which I proved by wearing huarache sandals, a beret and shades. My body was in a suburb of Denver, but my soul was in Greenwich Village, a place I could not find on a map of Manhattan. But I digress, as is my wont.
As the decades have rolled by, the idea of self-reliance has increasingly revealed to me its fraudulent nature. Simply put, there is no such thing as self-reliance. There may be a few—a very few—people who live as solitary hermits far from the madding crowd whose reliance is only to a small degree on their fellow human beings. They are not, however, so much self-reliant as reliant on the natural world that surrounds them—the plants, animals, rivers, waterholes, caves and canyons that form the network of interdependent entities that nowadays we call a habitat. Who knows what such hermits think, but my guess is that in order to survive at all, they must form habits based on their experiences of what works and what does not. In short, their thought patterns are for the most part habitual and therefore consistent from one day to the next. Hermits such as those cannot afford the luxury of thinking today what contradicts everything they thought yesterday. If they cannot do so, how much less can we who live within any kind of human society do so?
Emerson had many intriguing and even a few useful ideas. His notion of self-reliance was not one of them. Perhaps tomorrow I will think differently.
Meditation without beliefs
If anyone is interested in seeing me become uncomfortable in a hurry, the surest method of achieving that goal is to ask me my opinion about something. Anything. Perhaps some of the discomfort arises because of uncertainty about why my opinion is being solicited. Is the inquirer looking to pick a quarrel? Is the inquirer seeking my advice? If so, will the advice be followed? If it is, will I be held responsible for the consequences?
Perhaps most of the discomfort stems from my own uncertainty about what my opinion is. Over the decades I have learned that most of my opinions are liable to change, so there is really not much point in anyone learning what my opinion on anything at any given moment is. Often enough, the moment I have expressed what I think my opinion may be, the shortcomings of the opinion become so obvious that I feel foolish for having expressed it.
Enough of this pointless speculation about why being asked my opinion makes me uncomfortable. Like most things in life, it really does not matter.
Doxastic minimalism
In 1988 I wrote a book about the Indian Buddhist philosopher Dignāga. At the time I was writing the book I was intrigued in some of the points of commonality between Dignāga and an earlier Indian Buddhist philosopher, Nāgārjuna. Both of these authors seemed to me to represent a philosophical attitude that I called doxastic minimalism, that is, the preference to keep speculating and personal opinions to a minimum. (The English word “doxastic” is derived from the Greek δοχαστικοσ, meaning conjectural, which is derived from the verb δοχαζειν, meaning to conjecture, to guess.) Whether it was accurate to portray these Buddhists from long ago as doxastic minimalists is for others to ponder. All I know is that the idea of doxastic minimalism appealed to me personally for some reason—perhaps for no good reason—and that I was bold enough to project my own attitudinal preferences onto two ancient philosophers whom I happened to be studying at that moment.
One very good way to achieve doxastic minimalism is to study logic and epistemology. This, it seems to me was the strategy preferred by the Dignāga, or at least of the Dignāga of my fantasy world. What Dignāga did in his principal work, Pramāṇasamuccaya (Collected writings on the means of acquiring knowledge), was to lay out the criteria that would have to be met for a thought or belief to be established as truthful. Without going into details here, the upshot is that remarkably few of the propositions running around inside our heads meet these criteria. That is not to say that the propositions in our heads are false; rather, it is to say that the vast majority of our beliefs, thoughts, and propositions are indeterminate. They are beliefs that cannot be established as either truths or falsehoods. Realizing that tends to make a person feel a bit more humble and less prone to being intoxicated by a sense of certainty.
As I imagined Nāgārjuna, his strategy was to examine the very idea of what it means to establish a belief as true. The examination, articulated in his work Vigrahavyāvarttanī (Averting disputes), goes approximately as follows. Any belief in order to be deemed established as a truth, must be warranted by observed data or by another belief that has itself been established as a truth. But the belief that a given observed datum or another established belief is an adequate warrant is itself a belief that requires a warrant, and that gives rise to an infinite regress. A belief needs a warrant. The belief that a belief needs a warrant needs a warrant. The belief that the belief that a belief needs a warrant needs a warrant needs a warrant. No matter how far one pursues this chain of warrants, one arrives at a putative warrant that is itself unwarranted. This strategy seems more radical than Dignāga’s, in that Dignāga’s method shows that astonishingly few of our beliefs are grounded in a warrant, whereas Nāgārjuna’s method leaves us with the sense that there are, in the final analysis, no warranted beliefs. Note that this can only be a sense; if it were an established truth, then it would be a counterexample to the claim that there are no warranted beliefs.
Meditation without beliefs
I have no idea whether meditation is a good way to achieve anything. That question does not even interest me very much, because I am not in the business of promoting meditation. It is something that I started doing because I thought it would result in changes that I regarded at the time as potentially positive, but eventually I was not sure what it means for a change to be positive. Perhaps change is nothing more nor less than just change.
By now I meditate only because it is a habit that is, so far as I have been able to tell, relatively harmless. One could say I do it for aesthetic, or perhaps hedonistic, reasons. I enjoy it. Usually. To be more accurate, I usually enjoy the things I do that I call meditation. There are plenty of things that people do that they call meditation that I do not enjoy at all. Guided meditations, for example, tend to irritate me. Being told to relax tends to make me tense. Being told to focus on my breath tends to make me want to solve algebra problems in my head or see how far I can get in recalling Bach’s second Brandenburg Concerto.
By far the least satisfying modes of meditation to me are those that have a hidden or explicit agenda of reinforcing some dogma or other. (The English word “dogma” comes from the Greek δογμα, which is derived from the verb δοκειν, meaning to think or to seem good.) For example, Buddhist vipaśyanā (insight) exercises have the agenda of reinforcing the Buddhist dogma that every experience is ultimately unsatisfactory because it is transitory and neither one’s self or one’s property. Other forms of meditation are meant to reinforce the dogma that God (or Buddha nature, or Brahman, or Awareness, or Spirit, or Unconditional Love) is the fundamental core of every living and sometimes even every non-living being and that because this ineffable entity is the true self (ātman) of all beings, all beings are in a sense one. There are people who seem to thrive on meditative exercises rooted in such ways of talking. I am not among them. I do not like being told what I will believe after doing the meditative exercise properly, nor do I thrive on being assured that if I emerge without embracing the dogma, then I must be doing the meditative exercise improperly.
Fortunately, there are meditative exercises for people with temperaments unfortunately like mine. Not surprisingly, the exercises that are conducive to doxastic minimalism are themselves minimalist in nature. One example is the exercise (if one can call it that) called shikantaza (just sitting). Although it is called just sitting, it can just as well be done standing, walking or reclining. The instructions are admirably simple. 1. Just sit. 2. Eventually stop sitting. No need for a timer, a bell, a set of robes, a special mat and cushion, or a guy creeping around the room with a cricket bat ready to hit you if you move a muscle or begin to slouch. Just sit. And then do something else.
There is another meditative protocol that has become popular during the past few decades, one that I find satisfactory. It is called Centering Prayer, but I must confess I have no idea why it is called that. It is similar in many ways to shikantaza, except that one is encouraged to use an anchor of some kind to keep one’s chain of thoughts from growing too long. This anchor can be a single word, but it can just as well be a visualized image, or one’s breath. The purpose of the anchor is not to focus single-pointedly on it, but rather to return to it momentarily if one catches oneself pursuing a train of thoughts, feelings, or emotions. Some Centering Prayer practitioners guide themselves by what are called the four R’s. They are:
- Resist no thought.
- Retain no thought.
- React to no thought.
- Return gently to the anchor. (Some versions refer to the anchor as the sacred word.)
In Centering Prayer parlance, the word “thought” refers to anything that comes into the mind, whether it be a verbally articulated idea, a bodily sensation, an emotion, a fantasy, a vision, or a fleeting conviction that one has attained unsurpassed supreme enlightenment. Retain no thought. Let it go.
That’s enough words.
The puzzle of religious identity
A while back a clinic at which I had an upcoming appointment called me to ask questions in preparation for my visit. One of the questions was “What is your religious preference?” The question took me by surprise—of what medical relevance could that possibly be to an otorhinolaryngologist? Do the nostrils of an evangelical Christian look different from the nostrils of a Zen Buddhist?
What took me even more by surprise than the question was that I answered it quickly and without hesitation. More surprising yet was my answer: “Quaker,” said I. After the call ended, I reflected on the fact that for several decades my response to that question, on the rare occasions it has arisen, has always been “Buddhist.” Why, after decades of identifying as a Buddhist, did I spontaneously have a different answer?
As I began to think about this, I began by reflecting on the fact that I have dual citizenship, being a citizen of the United States by birth and a citizen of Canada by naturalization. For years I carried two passports. When entering the United States I always showed my U.S. passport, and when entering any other country I showed the Canadian passport. When traveling outside North America, I always thought of myself and identified myself to others as Canadian. Now that both passports have expired, I don’t travel outside North America. I now live in the United States again and vote in local and federal elections whenever the opportunity arises, but despite exercising the rights of a citizen, I cannot easily think of myself as a citizen of the United States or any other country. I have ceased to believe in countries; they are at best a conventional conceptual structure that I reject but to which practical life requires some degree of acknowledgement, however reluctant.
My attitude toward religions that have names is parallel to my attitude toward countries that have names and borders. The most emotionally honest answer to the question “What is your religious preference?” would be the same as the most emotionally honest answer to the question “What is your citizenship?” The answer to both questions would be “None.” And yet, I do have membership in two religious organizations, both of which I maintain. I have no preference of one over the other. It has mostly been through force of habit that when asked I tend to tell people I’m a Buddhist.
So why did I recently answer the question of religious preference differently? As I thought about this further, it occurred to me that I have always seen myself as a pretty substandard Buddhist, at lest by traditional criteria. I don’t particularly like or get any inspiration from Buddhist rituals. I don’t really believe anyone has ever attained nirvana, which is traditionally said to be the complete eradication of the afflictions of greed, hatred, and delusion. Nirvana is also traditionally said to be the cessation of rebirth, but I have never believed in rebirth in the first place. As far as I am concerned, everyone who manages to die has attained the end of consciousness and has no worry of being born as an animal or a ghost or a denizen of any of the hells or paradises cooked up by the common human reluctance to face oblivion; it follows from my convictions, if they are true, that either everyone attains nirvana, or no one does.
I find it impossible to believe that anyone has ever existed who can accurately be described by the fulsome praise embedded in the formulaic description of the Buddha: “noble, fully awakened, perfect in knowledge and conduct, knower of the world, unmatched teacher of gods and people” and “the best teacher on two feet.” Are there any gods to be taught? Can anyone who is a teacher of people be called unmatched or the best? Surely there are countless thousands of very good teachers, people whose advice it would benefit almost anyone to follow. Why single out one good teacher as the best? None of the traditional praise of the Buddha makes much sense to me.
All told, if being a Buddhist entails going for refuge to the Buddha and the Dharma (which, as an item of refuge is understood as the ultimate goal of nirvana) and the Community, I fail to go for refuge to at least two out of three of the traditional Buddhist refuges. Truth be told, I don’t even believe in the community as it is traditionally understood by Buddhists, namely, as the community of noble persons, those being the people who have eradicated various false views, sexual desires, anger, pride and various other afflictions. My belief is that if one is born human, one dies human and is human every moment in between birth and death, and being human inevitably involves having an amygdala and all the “base” and “animalistic” mental states that originate in that part of the brain that human beings share with other deuterostomes.
By now it must be clear that I fall short of all traditional expectations of what it means to be a Buddhist. So how could I ever have thought of myself as a Buddhist at all? The answer to that is that one key teaching of Buddhism has made more sense to me than any other teaching anywhere, and that is that all internal and external turmoil arises from the presence of greed, hatred and delusion, and the more those afflictions are subdued, the greater the odds of feeling some degree of comfort while alive. While it is true that many philosophies incorporate that same key teaching in one way or another, it just happens that I first heard that teaching clearly articulated by Buddhists, so it is to Buddhism that I habitually give credit, even while acknowledging that Stoicism, along with most if not all of the world religions, and humanism deserve equal credit.
I suppose I thought of myself as a Buddhist because in my own mind it was the standards of Buddhism of which I was most conscious of falling short. I’m quite confident that I am equally far below the standards of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Daoism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and Sikhism, but what stood out in my mind, because of the accidents of who got to me first to shape my thinking, was my being below the standards of Buddhism.
What changed recently, I think, is that I have been reading quite a bit in recent months about the Quaker notion that one’s life—the way one lives—is the only real testimony to one’s faith. I admit to being very weak in any kind of faith, but if I did have any of it to give testimony to, I think I’d prefer to give testimony to it in the specific ways that liberal Quakers do, namely, by manifesting integrity, simplicity, peace, equality and community (or at least as much of community as an introvert like me can face). As I look at the reality of how my life has unfolded, I stand convicted of having manifested those ways of testimony rather poorly. And it is, I submit, because lately I have been far more conscious of being a substandard Quaker than of being a substandard Buddhist that I blurted out that my religious preference on that day was Quakerism.
I still do not see what possible relevance my or anyone else’s religious preference has to an ear, nose and throat specialist. Perhaps I should have answered that I am a secular humanist with a deviated septum.
Writing to faceless readers
When I picture my mother, Helen Louise Schooley Hayes (03/11/1922–09/16/1993), the image that most often comes up is of her sitting at a table, a fountain pen in hand and a sheet of lined paper in front of her, a cup of coffee off to one side and an ashtray with a lighted Pall Mall cigarette on the other side. When I picture her at different stages of her life and in different places where we lived, the table may be different, as also the brand of cigarette, but the cup of coffee and the fountain pen and lined paper are invariably present. I can still see her looking thoughtfully into space, taking a couple of drags on her cigarette, then lighting up with a smile and writing a few more sentences. Watching her write, even when as a young child I occasionally resented being ignored, brought me joy.
These pictures in my mind are almost the only ones I have of my mother. She hated being photographed. One Christmas she gave me a camera and then threatened to take it away from me when I snapped a photo of her preparing Christmas dinner in the kitchen. Years later she joked that she hated to be photographed because cameras only captured her overweight exterior and graying hair and failed to capture her inner beauty. It was one of the many light-hearted comments she made that contained a grain of truth.
During her lifetime, my mother wrote thousands of letters to her friends and relatives. Writing letters was nearly a daily activity. Her letters were written in a style that showed the influence of her favorite authors: James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, William Saroyan, Erma Bombeck. They were funny, clever, insightful, self-deprecating. She had a gift for drawing attention to human foibles by telling stories that illustrated her own. Like many people who write well, she had a tendency to lurch in the direction of depression, and I suspect that writing letters was a way of cheering herself up and keeping things in perspective—humor is, after all, one of the classical defense mechanisms. Whether or not she cheered herself up by composing her wry epistles, she nearly always managed to cheer up the recipients.
Several of the people to whom my mother wrote frequently, including myelf, urged her to consider writing a book, or at least essays to be submitted regularly to magazines. It seemed a shame that only one person at a time could enjoy her witty observations. Her response to such urgings was always the same: she could not imagine writing anything that was not addressed to a particular individual. When she wrote to a friend, she wrote what she knew that friend would appreciate reading about. If she could not picture a specific recipient reading her words, her muse remained mute. Although she loved language, she did not write for her love of well-turned phrases. She wrote for her love of specific people. She wrote to connect with them, one at a time, the way that intoverts prefer to connect with others.
When I was an undergraduate the first time around, I majored in English composition, which involved learning to write for several genres—poetry, short stories, plays, technical treatises, essays, even novels. I discovered that, like my mother, I could rarely write anything unless I had a specific reader in mind. If I imagined my professor, or my roommate, or one of my uncles, or the ghost of Mark Twain reading the piece I was writing, the words flowed more easily, and the result, I fancied, was more satisfactory than when I tried to write to an anonymous, faceless reader.
In one of my several attempts to encourage my mother to write for a wider audience, I suggested that she might try writing an essay with a specific reader in mind and then send it to be published. The finished product would surely be appreciated by far more people than the one for whom she was writing it. She thought about it for a moment and then told me it would never work. If she knew that eventually she would send it to a wider readership, she would also know that she was only pretending to write it for a specific reader, and her writing would reveal the pretense. It would lack authenticity. At the very least, it would lack the characteristic that made her writing such a joy to read, namely, that it was intensely intimate. On the other hand, if she really did write a piece for a specific reader, she would then feel it was a betrayal of that person, almost an invasion of the privacy of both the writer and the intended reader, if she shared the writing with a wider audience.
My mother lived long enough to see a computer enter her household. Despite all my father’s enthusiastic endorsements of the modern convenience of WordStar as a writing tool, my mother could not be tempted to try to compose a letter on that alien contraption. Even using a typewriter robbed a letter of its personal touch—a letter really should be written with a fountain pen, so the reader could detect all the subtle fluctuations of mood that showed up in the handwriting—but a letter noisily hammered out on a dot-matrix printer connected to a desktop computer was far too impersonal, not to mention just plain ugly, for words. The computer, she was quite sure, was a passing fad, for such a gimmick could never be used for true communication.
Looking back on my adolescent and adult life, I recall writing three or four letters a week to various friends and relatives. That habit stopped not long after a computer found its way to my desk when I was forty-one years old. My fountain pen eventually got put into a drawer and never came out again, and soon afterward my muse sought employment elsewhere. For the past thirty-three years I have been condemned to writing lifeless prose to faceless, and largely nonexistent, readers.
Imagine there’s no countries
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace, you
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will be as one
—John Lennon (1940–1980)
Earthrise
In many of the the 2018 midterm election campaigns, some candidates are described as advocating open borders. Although there are few, if any, political candidates in the United States actually advocating open borders of the sort that exist in the European Union, it is interesting to think of what it would be like to have an agreement among all the countries in the Americas that would allow people to move freely anywhere in the American continents and the Caribbean islands to pursue a livelihood. What would it be like if workers could move from one country to another as easily as corporations do? This thought experiment can be taken one step further. What if there were no nations at all and therefore no borders to cross?
On Christmas eve in 1968, in the course of the Apollo 8 mission to orbit the moon, the lunar module pilot Bill Anders took a photograph of the distant earth with the surface of the moon in the foreground. The photo, entitled “Earthrise,” has been called by the nature photographer Galen Rowell ‚ “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.” Nearly fifty years after the photograph was taken, in a PBS program called Earthrise: The First Lunar Voyage, members of the crew of Apollo 8 reflected on the impact that seeing the earth from a lunar orbit had on them.
One of the observations that several astronauts who have seen the earth from the moon or from the international Space Station have made is that when our planet is seen from a distance, it is possible to see natural features such as oceans and large lakes and mountain ranges and deserts, but it is not possible to see human-made features such as nations, states and counties. When seen from that perspective, it is apparent that the earth is surrounded by dark space and that there is nothing nearby on which the inhabitants of the planet can call for help. If the inhabitants of the earth are to survive, they must do so by cooperating with one another. Within the human race, that cooperation may best be achieved if a focus on differences—differences in nationality, ethnicity, ideology and religion—is not allowed to take priority over a focus on basic common needs. As the human race interacts with other species, the common needs of human beings are best met by remembering that we human beings are only one of countless other interdependent lifeforms on this planet. It is because the photograph Earthrise makes all that cooperation and interdependence easier to grasp that it has been called the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.
The role of mythology
In his book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, the historian Yuval Noah Harari discusses the influence that fictitious narratives play in human history. Examples of the fictions he explores are money, corporations, nations, ethnicity, personal identity and freedom. Harari points out that while it may be easy for a modern person to regard the Sumerian deity Enlil as a fiction and to see as fictitious narrative the belief that all the lands and crops and precious artifacts offered to Enlil are private property owned by Enlil, it may be more difficult to see that a corporation is also a fictitious entity and that it is a socially constructed fiction that the corporation owns lands. Most people probably do not regard it as preposterous to believe that Canada is real and that it owns part of the Arctic or that a British-Australian multinational corporation named Rio Tinto Group is real and that it owns the Bingham Canyon open pit copper mine in Utah. Why, then, would they regard it as preposterous that the Sumerians believed that all the land around them was owned by the god Enlil?
Harari does not advocate banishing fictitious narratives from our lives. Rather, he advocates recognizing that they are fictions. They are myths that give our lives meaning and that facilitate large-scale social co-operation. It would be very difficult, if not impossible, for human beings to co-operate with large numbers of total strangers whom they have never met and never will meet without some kind of shared mythology. Mythology is therefore not to be avoided altogether, but it is important to realize that myths serve specific purposes under particular circumstances. As circumstances change and human needs change, then successfully meeting those needs may require a change in the fictitious stories we tell one another so that we can work together.
A question worth thinking about today is whether the fiction of nation-states is still serving the collective needs of humanity. There may have been a time when the story of having countries to kill or die for served a useful purpose. It may well be that we have entered a time when it is increasingly counterproductive to believe that a nation has a right to withdraw from co-operating with other nations to address such global predicaments as the warming of the planet through the combustion of fossil fuels. Perhaps it is time for international co-operation to give way to a kind of co-operation in which the very idea of a nation no longer plays a role, some kind of post-national co-operation. This is a possibility I have explored elsewhere.
Out of a living silence 