Everything Under Attack

Pop neuroscience is under attack, so says the NY Times.

Meet the “neuro doubters.” The neuro doubter may like neuroscience but does not like what he or she considers its bastardization by glib, sometimes ill-informed, popularizers.
A gaggle of energetic and amusing, mostly anonymous, neuroscience bloggers — including Neurocritic, Neuroskeptic, Neurobonkers and Mind Hacks — now regularly point out the lapses and folly contained in mainstream neuroscientific discourse. This group, for example, slammed a recent Newsweek article in which a neurosurgeon claimed to have discovered that “heaven is real” after his cortex “shut down.” Such journalism, these critics contend, is “shoddy,” nothing more than “simplified pop.” Additionally, publications from The Guardian to the New Statesman have published pieces blasting popular neuroscience-dependent writers like Jonah Lehrer and Malcolm Gladwell. The Oxford neuropsychologist Dorothy Bishop’s scolding lecture on the science of bad neuroscience was an online sensation last summer.
As a journalist and cultural critic, I applaud the backlash against what is sometimes called brain porn, which raises important questions about this reductionist, sloppy thinking and our willingness to accept seemingly neuroscientific explanations for, well, nearly everything.
Voting Republican? Oh, that’s brain chemistry. Success on the job? Fortuitous neurochemistry! Neuroscience has joined company with other totalizing worldviews — Marxism, Freudianism, critical theory — that have been victim to overuse and misapplication.
A team of British scientists recently analyzed nearly 3,000 neuroscientific articles published in the British press between 2000 and 2010 and found that the media regularly distorts and embellishes the findings of scientific studies. Writing in the journal Neuron, the researchers concluded that “logically irrelevant neuroscience information imbues an argument with authoritative, scientific credibility.” Another way of saying this is that bogus science gives vague, undisciplined thinking the look of seriousness and truth.

Well. There is a more than a bit of silliness in much of the pop-whatever these days: "Wisdom of the crowds" (Walmart Black Friday stampedes anyone?) and "Blink" come immediately to mind.   As well as anything David Brooks has ever written, if that qualifies.

Still...Brain's neuronal connections being plastic and all that...it seems intuitively obvious that some people with rigid thinking - yeah, some extreme right wingers - well, their brains do seem to work differently.

And as regular readers to this site know, the author is no fan of "spiritual" "mind" "technology."  Gladwell was right about a few things, most interestingly the need to practice a lot. So yeah, be skeptical a bit. 

But then again everything is "under attack."  Dosho Port seems to be going in the direction of saying Zen is "under attack" because, hey, it seems Sasaki Roshi couldn't keep his hands to himself, and... he's still going strong at 105.

Sooner or later everything ought to be questioned,  especially Zen.   There's a crack in everything, Leonard Cohen said - it's how the light gets in.  

But keep going. 

And a brief word to Adam Tebbe...

...based on what I read here.   Ultimately, any "teacher" whose misbehaved in the course of his teaching will have to deal with the fallout of that, as will the objects of that "teacher's" misbehavior.

But there's no point in trotting near paranoia and conspiracy theories.

But...let me just say this:

The  rumored or reputed misbehavior of "teachers'" is not the Way,   but so it is also for scandal blogging for the sake of scandal blogging.

Point is this: Even Genpo and Eido Shimano and  George W. Bush are worthy of compassion.

Difficult, ain't it? Genpo may be a phony (Brad Warner's very legit beef with him), but that guy too is worthy of compassion.

Ain't gonna be happy all the time, and most certainly shouldn't

That's what came to me as I read this.   Stress has a purpose, just as relaxation and being care-free does.   No doubt you can have apps that improve your life, and more will come, apps that observe you.  But happiness won't come without unhappiness.

Thanksgiving Zen Scandals

Oddly enough it seems when holiday season comes around, it's time for another scandal at a Zen center somewhere or other.  

I am beginning to have  mixed feelings about all these "Zen Center Scandals."  Yeah, don't sexually harass folks, Zen teachers.  No sh!t, Sherlock, at this point, right?  But some of this stuff, especially the Mt. Baldy stuff, does not start to make sense to me at all.  I was going to write a lot more about this, but I would just like to take one example for now, that featured prominently Sweeping Zen.

Myoan Grace Shireson, you almost write were groped on the grounds of a Zen temple. I believe you. But when you say "Not only was there a culture barrier, but we had been instructed to be friendly to lay people..."  Culture barrier? Culture barrier?  Are you kidding me???? I have no idea how old you are, but I guarantee you  that when you were in Japan there was a name for such people: 痴漢, ちかん　which translates as "pervert."  Yes, they have issues like this on trains in Japan (and a reverse problem where many men are afraid to sit near a woman on a train for fear of  being falsely accused).   But in no way is this an accepted part of the culture.   There are different sexual morés in Japan, to be sure and yes, they have had more than their share of issues with gender equality to put it mildly.   But in Japan, the guy who groped you was a 痴漢,   such people are not tolerated and haven't been for years, and what you experienced wasn't a culture barrier but instead an ignorance of their culture.

I also don't know how long you've been in Japan or how many times you've visited there, but if you've been there frequently, and if you have a reasonable knowledge of the language and culture today, there simply is no reason for you to have phrased your experience there this way - you'd have known what the culture is in this regard; all you have to do is know people and ride a train in a major city, for example.

I might add the rest of your post there is similarly culturally uninformed and hardly inclusive in language, presupposing that the only form of harassment that can take place is a male in a position of power abusing a female with less power.  Police and authority figures in government are indifferent to everyone; I'm sure it's worse with women, but c'mon, been through airport security lately?

The best way for Zen centers, frankly, to deal with this problem might not be to register as religious institutions, but as corporations subject to corporate law on harassment, etc.   The law is an imperfect tool, but it does at least provide redress and remedy when harm is done.

One other point I want to make about this, as a guy who's been studying Zen for a number of years. It's why I'm increasingly ambivalent about this whole Zen scandals everywhere thing.  When you've studied with a teacher for a number of years, they don't really seem as gods, but they seem every atom a human being.  I don't care what the teacher is teaching, but every good teacher, if you are with them long enough, you will see they're slobs just like you, though with more knowledge and skill.

I'm reading about the Mt. Baldy scandal, and I just can't square "sexual scandal" with "the teacher is a slob just like you."  That is to say, - and I direct this to commenters who are citing POWER POWER POWER as a reason for "why" these scandals happen - when you've trained for a period of years, it is simply inconceivable if you're training with any halfway competent teacher that you will see any kind of "power" differential at all, because why the teacher may be older, more knowledgeable and more skilled, after a certain point it gets to the point where it becomes kind of obvious that you're capable of getting there without that particular teacher, because whatever's getting you there isn't him, isn't really you, but it's in the nature of - or lack thereof - in the 5 aggregates so to speak. It just is.  And so your teacher isn't a god, but a guy helping you along, even if you're never actually given adulation and praise for a snappy koan answer.  You've come to expect that bell to ring telling you sorry bud, sanzen's over for today, better luck next time, and it's not so important that you have to invest ego, time, worry, self-image, etc. etc. over it.  It's important, but not important to use a logic by which Leonard Cohen described Joshu Sasaki roshi.

That's what I find hard to square with this sexual harassment.  Plus the guy's over 100 years old.  But mostly the former. Sasaki roshi was evidently, at least echoing what was an effective teaching at least for some people.  And maybe he was a 痴漢.   Maybe he's been both of them.    But it reeks of Orientalism to say that such things as gropings are tolerated in Japan, and yeah,  what Stuart Lachs has said elsewhere.   These people aren't gods and aren't viewed as such in their own societies.  They may be rare in this country or the world, but isn't everyone?

A couple of brief thoughts about the importance of the Great Matter in "Western" Buddhism

Does anyone really care about the hippies anymore?   Does it really matter one whit if the importance of the Great Matter is emphasized or not in "Western" Centers?


皆様は、死刑がある。

Everyone has been given the death penalty. It's a consequence of being born.  The resolution of the  Great Matter is our resolution of the cold, hard fact that this is the case for those between birth and death.

And any substitution of the deep knowledge and action on our 死刑 with "pragmatic psychology which is meant to address universal human ethical concerns"  really pretty much is bullshit.  Human ethical concerns are only realized with the deep knowledge and action on our 死刑.

Who the hell writes this stuff?

In reading what might be an otherwise unremarkable NY Times book review on a biography on Brigham Young, I came upon this passage:

The perennial question in Mormon history is: Whose side are you on? For over a century, the church cleaved to “faith-­promoting” histories about heroic Joseph and Brigham, and the evil Gentiles who persecuted them. As recently as 19 years ago, Salt Lake’s guardians of the Saintly flame excommunicated several prominent writers and historians for what the old-line Soviets would have called “deviationist” points of view. (Some of them have since rejoined the church.)

Turner is on the side of good history, and he generally negotiates the many tripwires in the Saints’ story — the “hall of mirrors,” as he calls it — with aplomb. For example, he unflinchingly recounts the notorious 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which Mormons and their Paiute Indian allies killed a group of emigrants from Arkansas. While he writes that Young encouraged the Indians to attack the wagon trains, Turner allows that no document directly links him to the horrific murders of 120 men, women and children. Turner does note that Young cynically billed the federal government for $3,527 worth of gifts supposedly distributed to “sundry bands of Indians near Mountain Meadow.” The gifts — steers, clothing and butcher knives — had in fact been plundered from the slaughtered settlers. What Turner calls “the dark stain the Mountain Meadows Massacre” left on Young’s reputation remains to this day.

That this guy, Brigham Young, is celebrated by any segment in our society is pathological, and probably  more pathological than if any segment of our society celebrated Sonny Barger - the latter I would claim and those like him are more honest in their endeavors.  You know what the Hell's Angels are.   They don't claim to be the one true religion yada yada yada.

Of course, that a nominee for President of the United States can't bring himself to address issues such as this - that is to say, how does he square his Mormon-ness with the questionable history of this church - and that nobody wants to go there is even more pathological.

"And a religious worldview, like any worldview, can dispose a researcher toward certain mistakes in thinking?"

So says the NY Times Beliefs editor.

I suspect the editor may be right, but not in the way that he thinks...

The case in point involved some kind of social science researcher who is some kind of right-wing Christian who managed to get a study published that claimed that households run by teh gay have more problems than otherwise, and the resulting brouhaha.

One can easily imagine why there might be reasons where this is true, but irrelevant (e.g., gays have more problems because heterosexuality as defined with a male patriarchy is privileged in this society, for starters).

But I digress a bit...

The worldview we should aspire to is no worldview.  The writer seems to make it as though worldviews were like clothing or hair styles, and most right wing Christians make this sort of appeal.    But it's immature in the extreme -it is like saying, do we want to play spies or cowboys and Indians or Muslim and Christian?

We shouldn't seek to adopt a set of beliefs - although much brouhaha has also been made of the Buddhism without Beliefs of Stephen Bachelor,  the point remains that Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, and the 10,000 things is going to be Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, and the 10,000 things no matter what we necessarily want to make believe is true about them.

So, in a sense, any worldview is already a mistake.

Changing the world...

I have recently been involved in trying to do something new in my work life.  This new thing is kind of evolving with a bunch of people.

There's obstacles.  The obstacles are being maneuvered in a 功夫 kind of way - "being like water."  Obstacles are a form of dukkha.  There's one particular obstacle that has been bothering me...but I think I figured a way around that obstacle - and it requires a profundity in what we are doing.

I think I may be on to something - the degree to which one can transcend the obstacles in life is the degree to which, in being like water, we make a profound radical change (not necessarily an arduous one.)

Thanks everyone for your continued support on this blog!

This is obviously, totally not the right way to go

If you give kids pills because their environment's bad, you are fostering the notion that you should not change what you should change, and you are fostering the notion that it takes something external to one to change what is inside of one. And it teaches them that there is separation, and that society's sicknesses must be accommodated  for rather than treated.

"I feel like it's getting out God's word to those who need it."

The NY Times reports on that curious sacrament of Texas, played with religiosity.'

School district officials ordered the cheerleaders to stop putting Bible verses on the banners, because they believed doing so violated the law on religious expression at public school events. In response, a group of 15 cheerleaders and their parents sued the Kountze Independent School District and its superintendent, Kevin Weldon, claiming that prohibiting the students from writing Christian banner messages violated their religious liberties and free-speech rights.

On Thursday afternoon, the two sides met in a courtroom on the second floor of the Hardin County Courthouse. It had all the trappings of a high-profile courtroom drama: Lawyers from both sides haggled over the Texas Constitution and the cheerleaders’ own constitution, a police officer with an assault rifle and binoculars was stationed on the roof, reporters filled the jury box, and one witness — Kieara Moffett, an 11th grade cheerleader — teared up on the stand during cross-examination.

The superintendent’s decision has outraged many students and their parents, and has brought national attention upon a small town about two hours outside Houston. The cheerleaders’ supporters have put up lawn signs and started a Facebook page called Support Kountze Kids Faith that, with nearly 50,000 members, far exceeds the town’s population of 2,100...

Each side’s lawyers cast their clients as courageous: The teenage cheerleaders, for standing up to the school district to protect their religious views, and Mr. Weldon, himself a Christian and a former football coach, for taking an unpopular position in a largely conservative Christian town in order to, as he sees it, uphold the law.

After a daylong hearing that included the testimony of two cheerleaders, District Judge Steven Thomas of Hardin County decided to extend for an additional 14 days more a temporary restraining order that he had put in place two weeks ago. The move prevents district officials from enforcing the ban on religious signs for 14 days and allows the cheerleaders to continue to create and display the banners at the home game on Friday night as well as other coming games. It seemed likely that the judge would hold another hearing in two weeks.

“I feel like it’s getting God’s word out to those that need it,” Kieara, 16, said of the banners.

Yeah, people need to see bible verses and they need to do so at the football games to which they go.

And yeah, Kieara, you surely feel that way,  I submit.

I don't know how far it goes back, but the arrogance of this stuff is breathtaking.  Regardless of what eventually happens in this case (which depends, naturally on case law being followed, which in this benighted time and that benighted place might be different than what one might expect), regardless of what happens, it certainly doesn't reflect well on the bible sputtering cheer-leaders, their parents, or their religion.

It all leads to death...and when you die, they die. The gut bacteria, that is.

My wife was reminding me last night about one acquaintance with a brain tumor who now can't recognize others and another who is in the last stages of liver cancer.

There's a heck of a lot of dreck that comes about in the course of living one's life.

And it all leads to death.

The trick is doing it gracefully, beautifully, and compassionately, and yes, with skill.

At the same time I still know the 67 year old guy who can do 詠春券 to the point where he can outdo others.

So, yeah, it depends on skill.

And when you die, they die.

Who?

The bacteria flora in your gut, inter alia.

The bacteria flora in your gut are responsible for amazing things. According to a recent RadioLab Show (entitled, helpfully enough, "Guts;" you can Google it, I'm working through a bad cold this week), the ecosystem of bacteria flora in your gut are more than possibly strong contributors to one's mood.

This brings the whole issue of 5 aggregates and all that into an entirely different realm, I think.

How to handle a pathological liar...or, advice to Barack Obama

I watched the debates last night, or I should say parts of them. Yeah, yeah Romney lied through his teeth and Barry pulled his punches.

I mean, if I were there, and Willard was spewing the lies that he told, I would have put it to him thusly:

"Mitt, we know what you've said in the past; it's recorded multiple times all over the place.  Either you've changed your positions - again - which brings up fundamental questions about trusting you - or - you're not being honest here tonight, which also brings up fundamental questions about trusting you.  Is there anything you'd like to walk back considering the video record that's out there?"

Simple enough.  Maybe the Obama folks know this and are going to blitz the airwaves with these ads which would be so easy to make.  But as for me, I simply would have said the above.  It's true, it's accurate, it's somewhat delicate.  And it pins Romney.  And it's what people would have wanted to see. 

Either that or the whole thing's been scripted from the get-go.  I can't discount that.

We're all downtrodden...even if we believe we're not...

An interesting point is made in the NY Times recurring talking head series "Room for Debate" by one Hastings Wyman, in this case, on why the South is more right-wing than the rest of the USA.  Well, actually he could have made it slightly better, so I'll make the slightly better version:

There were two ethnic groups alone in the South, and pretty much nobody else, unlike pretty much the rest of the country.  The native Americans were largely exterminated or ethnically cleansed.

So there weren't really Irish to realize that in their being picked on by the WASPs,  they were in solidarity with Germans,  Jews,  Poles, Italians, and,  yes, African Americans and Latinos.

I think it's one of the cases where if we can see our common state of dukkha, we're a bit better off; a smidgen of suffering is transcended right there.

A few things Stephen Chow on YouTube for your perusal

Because you can't get much Stephen Chow in the US of A...and I have nothing particularly edifying to say at the moment...







"The God of Cookery"









"Hail the Judge"







"From Beijing with Love"

I'm even younger than that now...

I am now listening to "My Back Pages," one of the great songs about maturity by Bob Dylan.

And I realize...

It's possible that it's possible to go beyond "My Back Pages."


There was a time when it all made sense to not take a hard position...but...

Sometimes you must sadly, regretfully, and with a sense of loss tearing you to the heart...to...

take a position that is black and white.

Sometimes,  despite the utter folly of humanity's existence, despite the complete insanity that defines everything from the murders carried about under Sargon to Pol Pot to George W. Bush that...

One must take a firm position: Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.

And sometimes, place where "Here I stand!" is, is a knife's edge.

Game theory, you know.

The moment someone says "Carthage Must Be Destroyed" ...well...that creates problems...for which one can only respond in certain ways...

More to come...time to deal with home stuff again...duties...see above.

I should have known it would be something like this...

So as it happens, there's a whole bunch of rare earth deposits, gems, and evidently valuable stuff that's being discovered as Greenland's ice sheet melts.

Now I get it.

Same principle as Tibet.


A person with a vested interest in exploiting a country chock full of untapped resources might make all kinds of justifications for doing anything or nothing as long as they can get their hand near the cookie jar.

Can't escape suffering. Nope.

It is not for nothing that we say we don't annihilate suffering but rather that we transcend it.

We cannot escape pain in life; it is what gives life its poignancy.

Can't escape death either.

It's good to be prepared.

Not a lot of separation. And yet separate, when it comes to genetics

A bit in the Sunday times on fatherhood and epigenetics:

Before I began reading up on fathers and their influence on future generations, I had a high-school-biology-level understanding of how a man passes his traits on to his child. His sperm and the mother’s egg smash into each other, his sperm tosses in one set of chromosomes, the egg tosses in another, and a child’s genetic future is set for life. Physical features: check. Character: check. Cognitive style: check. But the pathways of inheritance, I’ve learned, are subtler and more varied than that. Genes matter, and culture matters, and how fathers behave matters, too.  

Lately scientists have become obsessed with a means of inheritance that isn’t genetic but isn’t nongenetic either. It’s epigenetic. “Epi,” in Greek, means “above” or “beyond.” Think of epigenetics as the way our bodies modify their genetic makeup. Epigenetics describes how genes are turned on or off, in part through compounds that hitch on top of DNA — or else jump off it — determining whether it makes the proteins that tell our bodies what to do.  

In the past decade or so, the study of epigenetics has become so popular it’s practically a fad. Psychologists and sociologists particularly like it because gene expression or suppression is to some degree dictated by the environment and plays at least as large a role as genes do in the development of a person’s temperament, body shape and predisposition to disease. I’ve become obsessed with epigenetics because it strikes me as both game-changing and terrifying. Our genes can be switched on or off by three environmental factors, among other things: what we ingest (food, drink, air, toxins); what we experience (stress, trauma); and how long we live.  

Epigenetics means that our physical and mental tendencies were not set in stone during the Pleistocene age, as evolutionary psychology sometimes seems to claim. Rather, they’re shaped by the life we lead and the world we live in right now. Epigenetics proves that we are the products of history, public as well as private, in parts of us that are so intimately ours that few people ever imagined that history could reach them. (One person who did imagine it is the French 18th-century naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who believed that acquired traits could be inherited. Twentieth-century Darwinian genetics dismissed Lamarckism as laughable, but because of epigenetics, Lamarckism is staging a comeback.)

There are certain problems with the above text though in general I agree with its sentiment. First the problems: No, Lamarckism is not staging a comeback - Larmarckism held that in general acquired traits are inherited.

The degree to which we can make choices is also shaped by prior inputs and states,  and we don't know to what extent what was shaped by what because it's all interconnected.

But yeah, stop messing with the future in a bad way.

I've been REALLY busy lately, but...

I couldn't pass up this bit of what I can only see as strange news.

GAPYEONG, South Korea — North Korea has decided not to send a delegation to South Korea to attend the funeral of Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon, a senior church official said Thursday. "When I was in the North, I was told by the officials there that there would be no funeral delegation to visit the South," said Park Sang-Kwon, president of an automaking joint venture the church established in North Korea in 1999. Speaking to reporters at the church's headquarters at Gapyeong, east of Seoul, Park said officials in Pyongyang had cited lingering anger over a recent US-South Korea military exercise. "They said the North still had hard feelings... and it may be inappropriate for them to send the delegation after criticising the South so much in recent weeks," he said.

So let me get this straight:  A right-wing exploitative cult leader dies, and the cult-like leftwing dictatorship to the North had actually considered sending someone to this guy's funeral.

Weird.

Kitsch and Buddhist Imagery and What It All Might Mean

It's been a few weeks since I've had a blog post.  This has been for a variety of reasons, not the least of which has to do with the strange internet conditions in the People's Republic of China, the fact that I was doing something creative at work, and that creative thing was sorely needed.

In my travels to NY this year my siblings and I were involved in settling my mother's estate.   Evidently my mother was a rather avid collector of something called "Precious Moments."

She was, I think, under the impression that these things would increase in value, kind of like the way some people would have bought Thomas Kinkade "paintings" for the same reason.   Like Thomas Kinkade, these things ooze what is commonly called "kitsch."  The Wikipedia article on kitsch describes Milan Kundera's view on the subject:

The Czech writer Milan Kundera, in his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), defined it as "the absolute denial of shit". He wrote that kitsch functions by excluding from view everything that humans find difficult with which to come to terms, offering instead a sanitized view of the world, in which "all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions".

In its desire to paper over the complexities and contradictions of real life, kitsch, Kundera suggested, is intimately linked with totalitarianism. In a healthy democracy, diverse interest groups compete and negotiate with one another to produce a generally acceptableconsensus; by contrast, "everything that infringes on kitsch," including individualism, doubt, and irony, "must be banished for life" in order for kitsch to survive. Therefore, Kundera wrote, "Whenever a single political movement corners power we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch."

For Kundera, "Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch."

And this led me to the question: is Buddhist imagery kitsch? I think some imagery can be considered this way,  but not all of it can, just as some Christian imagery is definitely not kitsch, but some is.  

It is kind of interesting to me though that some aspects of Buddhist inspired arts, notably those Zen-derived, strive to incorporate some aspects of "real life," or emptiness, or wabisabi (侘寂).   

Coincidentally, there's been some discussion in the Buddhist blogosphere of something called "near enemies." 

I'll go out on a limb here and say I'm not sure there are such things as "near enemies."  There are, of course ways of being that are not conducive to the transcendence of suffering, to be sure.  And those ways of being are ways of being that just won't go - you cannot expect to be entirely rid of attachments, envy,  hatred, greed, etc. 

That's not the point, of course, the point is to transcend them.

But there is also talk of pity, indifference,  and something that is substituted for true feelings (which makes them, what, false feelings?).

I'm not sure there are such things...take pity for example.  Pity might not be the best of all possible worlds - that is pity as kindly sorrow for another, which, I'd submit recognizes a difference between the pitier and the pitied.  And it is a motivator of charity in which there is still a gaining idea (the problem with much of so-called "Christian charity.")

But I think it may be more of a continuum than a set of discrete and separate states. Pity might lead to compassion, if the pitier realizes his separateness from the pitied. 

I agree with Barbara, that it's good to have a relationship with a teacher to help. 

But one still shoulders the responsibility here. 

I may have more to say on this later.