Karma

I've been thinking through the concept of karma lately. It's a helpful myth for me in thinking about how we live in the world, even if I can't accept there being an actual moral law in the universe that punishes and rewards us. First, though, what are we as persons, as this or that individual human being with this or that personality? There are many, many factors which play a role and I don't mean to be reductionistic in my proposal. I'm not going to argue for or against the notion of a soul, or of individual existence after death, or what not. I'm just looking at how we forge our lives here and now, and the concept of karma makes sense for that.

How so? Think about this: are you a separate person from your genetics? Keep in mind, your genetics have an awful lot to do with every single aspect of your build and your brain. They give you a predisposition to be a bookish introvert or gregarious extrovert, a night person or a morning person, calm or irascible, capable or incapable of being Michael Jordan or Albert Einstein, and so on. So it would seem that you, as the person you consider yourself to be, would not be that person without your genetic printing.

Of course, your environment and upbringing also play a large role here. Would you be that same person if you had grown up in a different city? Country? In some places, how would being born a block west or east have changed your life? With different parents? With a different number of parents? In a multi-generational home, or with just your nuclear family? This would all seem to play at least as much a role in who you are as genetics.

This is the point, then: you are not you. You are these things that make you up. You might wish you had been born to a different family, but if anyone had been born to that different family, that person would not have been you. This is where karma comes in: you have inherited your karma, your situation in life with all of its implications. If you are born into one home, you'll have one set of skills and virtues. Born into another, you would have a different set, which would you helped "you" and the world around you perhaps more or perhaps less.

I have been born an American. When I look around at political debate in this country, I wish that I had been born at least a Canadian. Scandinavian wouldn't have been so bad either. But I wasn't. I was born here. This is where I actually am. The ideological debates between Republicans and Democrats is part of my karma. The myths of freedom and individualism and capitalism are part of my karma.

I have been "reincarnated" here, to pull on another myth, out of the conditions of my forebears. I am their decisions brought into concrete form, so I am them, in a sense.

So what do I do from here? This is where talk of purifying karma comes in, of dealing with it skillfully. What counts as skillful, I'll leave for other discussions. But one way or another, I need to work with my present situation. Whether or not one can transmute lead into gold, it sure isn't going to work if one doesn't use the lead at hand.

This then leads to my legacy, my own "reincarnation." Whether I deal with the world skillfully or unskillfully, I will leave imprints. These imprints will change those I'm friends with, those I teach, maybe even those I brush up against on the street for a moment. This will leave something for the next generation, one way or another, as a continuation of that karma and of my personhood.

Progress & Nature

In the course of trying to find a new course for myself, I find myself running up against two different intuitions about the world, which more or less were the content of the last post. The first is that nature simply is what it is, and there's not a whole lot one can do to change that. Human beings will be human beings and any attempt to force them into a different mold will rebound. I had wanted to get into education to change minds and so change society. But what I found was that the people who were already open-minded and engaged were the ones who, well, stayed the same. The people who really needed to turn around and look at the world, the people who will go on to vote and run things and who impact all of our lives through their “private” opinions, twisted my lectures into the exact opposite of what I said when necessary to protect their little paradigms. Really, this shouldn't be too surprising – the Enlightenment should have taught us that educated apes just do more damage in their certainty.

But at the same time, I can't shake the feeling that some sort of progress is possible, and that as someone in a privileged position, I have a responsibility to be part of that change. What good is intelligence if it can't actually provide foresight about the world's problems? When I'm planning out what to do and not already involved in something, I should be able to pick some life which would make a difference. The world doesn't seem to be merely a cycle, and I can't just hide somewhere while making my own life comfortable while things crumble around me. Maybe it's just my neurosis, but I can't just go off and till my own garden. It seems like a waste of a life, and honestly, life isn't so great that I want to live it merely for my own enjoyment.

Because of the first problem, I can't rely on naïve notions of progress, and I can't get wrapped up in idealistic projects. How can I commit myself to something that I know will probably fail? And I don't see any reason whatsoever to believe that there's any moral force in the universe, divine or otherwise, which will pick things up despite the appearances we've seen in history for thousands of years, or which will come alongside in my tasks when this force also seems to work with CEOs to build sweatshops. But we have seen that societies can change, at least somewhat, and that the way things have been is not the way they always must be, and I can't close my eyes to that either.

So there's this constraint: nature must be worked with. What are some solutions to the problem then? In martial arts, I think of how we work with natural forces to accomplish ends, so it at least seems possible in the abstract to change the world by working with nature. How does that translate into changing society, though? How do we work with the bigotry, power-grasping, tribalism, and narrow-mindedness that seem endemic to human nature (yes, including my own) to produce a society that rises above these things? At the end of the day, we still have our biology which was not built for modern life or for cosmopolitan living, but yet at the same time we can be aware of this and of the possibilities the future could hold. How do we combine the two?

I also think to the Chinese tradition, where you change the world by becoming virtuous yourself; then other people will naturally look to you. Of course, I'm skeptical about the efficacy of this. Confucius didn't seem to make much of a political difference in his day, and people studying him just made him into a new set of material to understand and a tool to demarcate the elite from the non-elite. But given the constraint that we can't just go and change other people by force, it seems like the only option would be to persuade them and let them arrive at the decision by themselves. The question is, what makes for viable persuasion.

This doesn't mean that we can't go and change material conditions as well – in fact, we need to do that. But that still only does any good if we can also change people around us and the structural forces that perpetuate the problems, and we can only do that by hacking the system, as it were. Shows of force in the end don't seem to change the situation, but merely repeat it – not that force is never justified, but that it doesn't seem to be a useful tool toward pushing the world to a different end. So what would work?

Quietism and Power

How does one best go about changing the world? On the one hand, it is tempting to take up a quietistic approach - let things be, and let nature take its course. Many times when we try to control events, we make a bigger mess of them. Let us just take care of our own garden, and then at least that portion of the world will be better. Similarly, we can cultivate ourselves, and if we succeed in becoming better people, we can naturally help people around us and inspire them.

But I'm not sure that that approach always works. I was reading an article earlier today about some presidential candidate who wants communities to decide what is best for themselves - by outlawing mosques. I might be able to convince a few people around me that Muslims are not about trying to conquer all of America, but that hardly changes the systemic problem of prejudice in this country. Nor does the quietist approach change the structures that continue poverty and racism, amongst other problems.

So trying to control things from a high-level standpoint, through laws and politics and positions of power, seems necessary to deal with some issues, but it also produces social problems to have this stuff forced on society. Plus, it's not really feasible for all of us, since few have that power.

I had thought about education as being a solution. Teach people to think critically about the world around themselves, and maybe that can help them deal with whatever problems can arise. But I'm cynical about that now. When I was teaching philosophy, the students who were already critically analytical and thoughtful about the world were the ones who benefited from studying more of the same. The ones who really needed to be reached, simply crammed whatever I said into their pre-made categories, sometimes to the point of believing that I was saying the opposite of what I actually said.

We can't actually change human nature, and it seems to be human nature to approach the world according to our pre-set paradigms and to find the opposite painful. No one escapes this, and most don't have the temper, time, talent, or opportunity to even start examining their worldview. So what do we do when these worldviews cause suffering? We can't just let communities decide for themselves, because there are no isolated communities. The communities of Muslims criss-cross the communities of Islamophobes geographically & politically, so which community wins out in making decisions? Simply being a nice person to those around me and making sure a few friends and a few students understand the world a bit better might relieve a little suffering, but does it actually change anything? How does one get people to think about things that they need to think about, for everyone else's sakes, but which they are resistant to examine?

Contingency and Intuitions

While preparing for comps, I came across a statement along the lines of "It is possible that Susan might not have been born. If you don't believe this, you are a philosopher with a theory."* But the issue seems so much more complicated than a dig at "theory-laden philosophers" would solve. I argue that our intuitions about which facts about the world are possible and which are necessary has relatively little to do with their actual status.

Take the following formula: 1,045,9879 * 230,840. What does it equal? Without stopping to work it out, does it possibly equal 2,414,557,468,360? It might seem like it could, but in fact, it doesn't and cannot possibly equal that amount. Our first intuitions about it don't mean much of anything. We must work through the chain of mathematical analysis, step by step, until we come to the answer.

We possibly get that problem wrong, but we don't ever think that 1+1=5. Why? Because there is only one step in the simple problem - it's almost impossible to misthink it. By contrast, there are many links in the chain of reasoning for the more complicated problem, and we don't immediately see all the links at once or how they are connected to each other.

"But," you might say, "we know that this is a mathematical problem, so we know that the answer must be necessary. But Susan's birth isn't math." Perhaps, but that doesn't mean that our intuitions about her possibly not-being are worth anything. It depends on whether physics is completely deterministic on a macro-level or probabilistic, on whether the initial state of the universal was necessary or whether it was random/intelligently designed/programmed by the great space potato/etc., on whether free human actions can alter the universe apart from deterministic laws, and so on. My intuition on Susan's birth isn't informed by the reality of any of those situations - that is, whatever makes me think of her possibly not being has nothing to do with my thoughts on these other matters. I think that her birth is merely possible, not because I actually understand anything about reality, but because I can't see the big picture to see how the complex web of causation operates. I see this little piece, and imagine it cut off from the whole, as if it actually could be, in the same way that I imagine that 1,045,9879 * 230,840 = 2,414,557,468,360 because I have not seen through all the steps.

In short, there seems to be no reason to leap from "I can conceive of x being possible/possibly not being," to "x must not be necessary." Our intuitions on states of affairs are completely bunk and should not be resorted to in our analysis of the world.

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*: I found the quote. It is: "If Sally, an ordinary human being, says, 'I might not have existed,' almost everyone will take her to have stated an obvious truth. (Anyone who does not will almost certainly be a metaphysician with a theory.)" Van Inwagen, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaphysics/