Watch where you're aiming that thing. You could hurt yourself.

One of the best things about the internet is that it is possible to juxtapose things that in their "native" contexts would not be against one another; you can contextualize almost anything with anything.

Here's a few links today:

• Nathan has a great article on the commodification and the co-option of mindfulness by techies in "Silicon Valley" (which, I understand, these days is a state of mind to many rather than the actual place).
• Nathan links to another critique of "Wisdom 2.0" gobbledygook,  which rightly points out that this whole meditation thing isn't doing much to deal with the whole feral capitalism thing.
• In case you missed it, some folks at Princeton have concluded that the US is no longer a functioning democracy, but rather an oligarchy.   That seems about right.

I could link more, but I have enough links here to make my point, or rather points:

• Inviting the wealthy to tread a path that transforms greed, hatred, and ignorance into wisdom, generosity and love is not a harmful or bad thing.
• That said, that path needs to involve ethical behavior.  That includes concepts of great compassion (大悲, だいじ ),  and benevolence 慈悲心 (じひしん) or  (仁、じん ).
• I haven't taken any polls, and have no demographic information per se, but I would wager the folks who are going to those Wisdom 2.0 conferences as well as the large majority of folks working in that imaginary Oz called "Silicon Valley"  are in agreement with the above points, as well as their critics.   Why do I say this? Well, for one thing,  though I'm not "in the Valley," I am not doing badly relative to most of the country and I agree with most of the critics.  Yeah, I'm one data point, but I know other people too, evidently.    Plus, in the "Wisdom 2.0" link above there's a quote from New Age person Marianne Williamson - I suspect her tirade about wealth was not badly received, at least because the article doesn't mention an adverse reaction on the part of her audience.

Which brings me to my main point: the real, ultimate issue in the wealth disparity issue is not addressed by attacking your natural allies, just as racism, religious bigotry,  and sexual identity oppression are not addressed by attacking one's natural allies either.  It benefits an oligarch to have those who are not in the club squabbling with each other,  and I'd suspect the folks at Wisdom 2.0 aren't in that club.  That club goes to Davos, or elsewhere. They would not  stand for having the usual mindfulness suspects hawking their "wisdom."  Don't get me wrong, I fully agree; a lot of that "Wisdom" stuff is shallow, and if it takes Marianne Williamson to make a dancing monkey remark, you know there's problems.  But I don't see the point of assuming that the folks at Wisdom 2.0 are responsible for the conditions under which electronics are manufactured, at least any more than anyone else.

And even in the case of a Steve Jobs (who gets way too much credit and blame for everything, even now),  as flawed as he was, not budging an millimeter from a position seeking care and justice for all, we should not wallow in the "No true Scotsman" fallacy.  Jobs was a Buddhist.  Maybe Jobs didn't move the world in a direction that produced utopia (Nicholas Kristof has an opposing view that I don't think needs expounding here, other than to point out that  such views exist, and I abhor them, frankly.)   But that did not mean he was not a Buddhist.

And if you're a Buddhist, chances are you're still suffering as well. There's always a potential that class enemies can be identified a little too close to home, if we're in the business of hunting down class enemies who are called that because they're not the poorest of the poor, or the most marginalized of the marginalized.  

I applaud Nathan's views about the commodification of mindfulness (though he should change the word "gates" in his post to "entrances.")   I would go in a slightly different direction, and not want to posit an "us versus them" scenario, but at the same time I, too, insist that progressives actually make progress, which is what I would expect of myself in my own life. 

Evolution and Buddhism?

Someone on the Twitter asked me about whether I knew any references regarding Buddhism and Darwin/Evolution.  It was mentioned that natural selection was kind of like karma.

Well, I'm not sure about that.  Or to put it another way, taking one aspect of science, and "comparing" it to Buddhism seems somewhat odd to me.   Contemporaneously with the question I received (more or less) there were articles in Salon about "Charles Darwin's tragic error"  and "Science doesn't disprove God: Where Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists go wrong." Every now and then Salon goes right off the deep end with junk such as this.   

I tend to be wary of the metaphors where "science" "proves" some aspect about religion.  I am also skeptical of religions that make falsifiable claims about which we don't have answers, although I suspect as well that some ethical and behavioral claims that Buddhism makes can be observed, tested, etc.  Recent activities on Twitter, especially in regards to racists and witch hunts, seem to practically shout such observability.   In the latter article in Salon above, there is a dash of anthropocentrism mixed with a lack of understanding of the nature of consciousness. 

The former article is perhaps more relevant to the question at hand.   Again, I view questions like, "How does Darwinian evolution relate to Buddhism?" along the lines of "How do Maxwell's Equations relate to Buddhism?"  Which is to say,  the science might explain some observables  about who and what's around, but, um, so what? 

The former article about Charles Darwin's "error" I think is more telling here, and more illustrative of the problem of imputing ideology to scientific observations:

Modern racism had several different intellectual sources, and only with difficulty could one say which of these was most important. I will focus here on the “scientific” strand of racism, which drew its inspiration from Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection. Several factors dictate  this emphasis on Darwinian racism. First, Darwinist racism explicitly motivated Hitler and many other leading perpetrators of the Holocaust. Second, Darwin inspired the researchers, most notably in biology and anthropology, who gave racism its aura of scientific certainty.  Third, Darwinian thought may well have been more popular in Germany  than anywhere  else during these years, in part because Germany was the world’s leading center of biological research before World War I and the Germans were exceptionally literate. Finally, Darwinist racism was the brand of racism most easily understood by the widest number of people, in part because Darwin’s theory was astonishingly simple and easy to explain. 

As Darwin’s theory gained widespread acceptance, thinkers of every stripe began to find lessons in it for understanding the politics and  society of their time, using Darwinian thought to support their own agendas. This so-called  Social Darwinism ran in many different political directions. The right-wing branch of Social Darwinism—which was not necessarily the most popular strand of it—promoted racism, justified social and political inequality, and glorified war. It also inspired Adolf Hitler and his ardent supporters to launch a world war and exterminate the Jews of Europe. 

Right-wing Social Darwinism produced several ideas that were attractive and convenient to the ruling classes of Europe and North America, and especially to Germany’s warlike and antidemocratic elites. The most important idea may have been “struggle,” the notion that all relations between individuals and between nations were defined by a merciless battle for survival. Struggle followed inevitably from the laws of nature as discovered by Darwin, and therefore had no moral significance.  The Christian injunctions to “love your neighbor” and “love your enemies”  had no place in the animal  kingdom;  neither should they control the behavior  of human beings, who were not made  in the image of God,  but rather counted  as nothing more than an especially clever type of animal. 

From these assumptions about struggle followed the argument that extreme social inequality was natural and permanent. The poor were poor because they were less fit than the rich. Charity for the poor blocked humanity from evolving to a higher plane, because it kept unfit members of society alive, allowing them to reproduce and pollute the gene pool with their inferior intelligence and moral weaknesses.  The belief in permanent struggle  also supported  a bias  toward violence  between nations, a glorification  of warfare. “Superior” peoples had every right  to conquer, exploit, and even exterminate “inferior” ones. If such aggression let superior peoples expand and become more numerous, the entire human race would  improve in the long run;  the extinction of lesser races was a cause for celebration rather than pity. In international relations, might made right: by winning a war, the victor showed that he deserved his victory, because his people were more fit to survive than were the losers...

Several points here are worth noting:

1. The author has at best a superficial understanding of Darwinian evolution; "love your neighbor," for example,  as well as other forms of altruism are indeed aligned with the notion of the "selfish gene" as Dawkins has put it.

2.  People co-opted Darwin's models outside of Darwin's field of discourse becomes "Darwin inspired" and therefore "Darwin is responsible."  This is dishonest.  If you want to put the fig-leaf of "intellectual" in front of that,  fine, but it is dishonest.  Yet people did do that. 

3. Social Darwinism is not biological evolution.  And even though Darwin's work was polluted with such co-option, it doesn't invalidate what Darwin wrote! 

The laws of natural selection are facts; to impute them as "proof" of a way of thinking is as useful as saying "it is raining now" therefore Buddhism is true.   There are a myriad of conditions, including some of which we have contributed, for which  the current weather can be explained.   Darwinian evolution, as observed, is a reflection of events transpired in environments, but it, too, is not the way. 

I will say this though: I think the two articles in Salon are an example of a certain type of greed and attachment: we want to believe we are special; we want to believe that our chosen practice is in accord with the universe(s) and by Jove, we've really got it!

Maybe we don't.   I think any good practice of the Way ought incorporate such a disclaimer, including any practice of the way associated with the writing of this post.  I.e., I might be wrong.