False pundits, totally muddled…
]]>The biggest danger we face today isn’t that industrial civilization will choke on its own exhaust or that democracy will crumble or that AI will rise up and overthrow us all. It’s that we will cease believing in the one force that raised humanity out of tens of thousands of years of general misery: the very idea of progress.
]]>We follow archaeological research and employ skeletal records of women’s and men’s health from 139 archaeological sites in Europe dating back, on average, to about 1200 AD to construct a site-level indicator of historical bias in favor of one gender over the other using dental linear enamel hypoplasias. This historical measure of gender bias significantly predicts contemporary gender attitudes, despite the monumental socioeconomic and political changes that have taken place since.
]]>We also show that this persistence is most likely due to the intergenerational transmission of gender norms, which can be disrupted by significant population replacement. Our results demonstrate the resilience of gender norms and highlight the importance of cultural legacies in sustaining and perpetuating gender (in)equality today.
Without the pressure of a life cut short, Keith Haring’s art might never have been as deep as it was. Yet that would have been a good trade.
On recognizing that “the nobility of suffering has always been a coping mechanism.”
]]>Being perceived as a good Buddhist woman worked as a powerful form of career capital for the respondents in the sample, who used their faith to combat gender disadvantage in their work settings.
]]>If the sense of self is doxastically anchored, then it will be anchored in the sort of belief that is ascribed along an action-based rather than judgement-based avenue.
A Western-philosophical exploration of the different levels of the “self” delusion.
]]>Political opponents respect moral beliefs more when they are supported by personal experiences, not facts.
Everyone can appreciate that avoiding harm is rational, even in people who hold different beliefs.
]]>These results provide a concrete demonstration of how to bridge moral divides while also revealing how our intuitions can lead us astray.
The first way to explain this unlikely fusion of merciful religion and a quite merciless modern creed is to remember to what degree the impact of Social Darwinism on early modern Korean intelligentsia was strong and lasting.
]]>For many young intellectuals aspiring to understand the basic principles of the new, “enlightened and modern” world, Social Darwinism was to very high degree synonymous with “foreign thought” and “modernity” as such – the more so, as this creed was on the one hand totally unconnected to the ideologies of traditional time, having no analogues, not even very crude ones, among them, and on the other hand structurally close to orthodox Neo-Confucianism as a philosophy explaining both natural and social phenomena.
In World War II, Britain invented the electronic computer. By the 1970s, its computing industry had collapsed—thanks to a labor shortage produced by sexism.
]]>… feeling close to the match is associated with an 86% increase in the probability of assimilation of political views. Our analysis also uncovers an asymmetry: Interacting with someone with opposite views greatly reduced feelings of closeness; however, interacting with someone with consistent views only moderately increased them.
]]>There is a tribe of people known as the Ethno-graphic Filmmakers who believe they are invisible. They enter a room where a feast is being celebrated, or the sick cured, or the dead mourned, and, though weighted down with odd machines entangled with wires, imagine they are unnoticed.
]]>When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.
What happens after all your culture’s ways of making meaning disappear? How can you move forward when the future is literally inconceivable?
A philosophical meditation on the courageous life of the great Apsáalooké (Crow Indian) Chief Plenty Coups.
]]>… municipalities of Spain with a history of a stronger inquisitorial presence show lower economic performance, educational attainment, and trust today. The effects persist after controlling for historical indicators of religiosity and wealth
]]>… individuals with high self-esteem did not respond to mortality salience with increased worldview defense, whereas individuals with moderate self-esteem did.
]]>The accession ceremonies comprise the most spectacular and awesome examples of imperial ritual, providing a well-documented and persistent illustration of the ways in which ritual inscribes social, political, and religious meanings
A brief analysis of the 1989 Japanese accession rituals.
]]>90 percent of Canadians [say they] will tell the truth in court. Whereas in other places, it would be crazy to tell the truth. Aren’t you a good friend? How you trade those virtues off has a big effect
On parochialism versus universalism in human societies and how Western culture became so WEIRD.
]]>What was the response of Soto Buddhist priests to the social situation facing Japan at the beginning of the twentieth century? What influence did their religious background have on their responses to the modernization of Japan? This article examines the lives and thought of two Japanese Soto Buddhist priests-Takeda Hanshi and Uchiyama Gudo-both with the same religious training and tradition, yet who chose diametrically opposite responses.
]]>Takeda Hanshi supported Japan’s foreign policies, especially in Korea; Uchiyama opposed Japanese nationalism and militarism, and was executed for treason. What led them to such opposite responses, and what conclusions can be drawn concerning the influence of religious traditions on specific individual choices and activities?
In response to Shintoist criticism of Buddhism in the early 1930s, a group of prominent Buddhists and Buddhologists wrote articles on Buddhism and Japanese spirit for a special issue of Chūō Bukkyo in 1934. They highlighted historical connections between Japanese Buddhism and the state, and drew correspondences between Buddhist doctrines and various Shinto and Confucian concepts that were central to discourses on Japanese culture and the imperial system in the early-Showa period. In drawing those doctrinal correspondences, they aligned Japanese Buddhism with main components of the imperial ideology at that time.
]]>What is meant by its central philosophical concept of “absolute nothingness,” and how did the Kyoto School philosophers variously develop this Eastern inspired idea in dialogue and debate with Western thought and with one another?
]]>… for all of its rhetoric about not relying on words and letters and functioning compassionately as a politically detached, iconoclastic religion, Zen has generally failed to criticize ideologies–and specific social and political conditions–that stand in tension with core Buddhist values.
]]>Yet a close examination of Zen theory and praxis indicates that the tradition does possess resources for resisting dominant ideologies and engaging in critique.
… though money is an idea, basically, it represents stuff, and stuff is made of carbon
An interview with the woman spearheading the new discipline explaining how human social structures impact the environment.
]]>Perhaps the most important consequence of high-tech modernism for the contemporary moral political economy is how it weaves hierarchy and data-gathering into the warp and woof of everyday life, replacing visible feedback loops with invisible ones, and suggesting that highly mediated outcomes are in fact the unmediated expression of people’s own true wishes.
]]>All these problems with information have always been a problem for human beings. Then you get the internet, which is the informational equivalent of giant cities and now it’s an existential crisis. So we’ll have to develop the generational equivalent of both sanitation at the platform level and best practices as individuals—the “washing your hands” of misinformation. Both things will have to happen
On what it takes to change someone’s mind, and a reflection on whether you should even try in the first place.
]]>Centuries, minutes later, one might ask
How the hilt of a sword wandered so far from the smithy.
… humans exhibit a tendency to identify, adopt, and enforce the norms of their local communities.
]]>The temples were a signal that the previous people who came to Delphi had gotten the truth.
]]>Ideas are what make you a person, a human. And that’s what Humanism must be. It has to be political and self-critical.
On the long history of “the Humanities” in European education and thought.
]]>… explanations do things to us and change the way we think about the future and change our expectations for who we can be
On the interaction between story-telling and medicine in psychological disorders.
]]>… engineering education successfully turns potential critics into agents of cultural reproduction
]]>Understanding this three-fold structure involves adding a third term to the common opposition of religion as the transcendent sacred and science as the mundane secular.
]]>Kālāmas, do not go by oral tradition, by lineage of teaching, by hearsay, by a collection of scriptures, by logic…
In this famous sutta, the Buddha outlines a practical epistemology.
]]>We tell a story about ourselves to create our self. And oftentimes we’ll behave in a way that reveals that our story is at least partly inaccurate […] The self is a much more slippery idea than we often give it credit for and that has enormous potential.
]]>She hides in the room she painted for herself,
tuning, listening…
I sit at the ocean’s edge,
At the grey ocean’s edge,
With you in my lap.
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
A classic of the “commencement speech” genre and a powerful defense of the importance of inner freedom.
]]>Phil kept all this to himself, though there was another person who noticed there was something different about the new guy…
An hour of stories of people failing to see what is right in front of their faces.
]]>The claim that Zen is the foundation of Japanese culture has the felicitous result of rendering the Japanese spiritual experience both unique and universal at the same time.
How globalization reshaped Zen.
]]>Today, thanks to a Canadian passport, I’m entering my father’s homeland for the first time.
A documentary about Tibetans and the struggle to preserve their culture under Chinese occupation.
]]>Are we really living according to our ideals?
A talk on overcoming philosophical laziness.
]]>Museum of Nonhumanity calls for the deconstruction of the categories of animality and humanity in order to enter a new, more inclusive era.
]]>You have to live your way into a new way of thinking.
An earnest introduction to humanity.
Primarily intended for young Americans, The Art of Being Human has enough perennial wisdom and charming sincerity to make it an enjoyable read for most.
]]>… even this view of yours, Aggivessana—‘All is not pleasing to me’—is even that not pleasing to you?
Deftly outmaneuvering an extreme skeptic, the Buddha discusses the outcomes of belief and disbelief. Rather than getting stuck in abstractions, he encourages staying close to one’s experiences.
]]>Power allows the ego to be with him- or herself in the other. It creates a continuity of the self.
An exploration of power reacting to a few modern philosophers on the subject.
I found the work engaging and impressive, despite its odd avoidance of the psychological. As a Buddhist, I can’t agree that “life as such cannot be understood in terms of causal relations,” though I appreciate the book, insofar as it advocates and “leads to […] an ethics and aesthetics of the no one: friendliness free of intentions, even free of wishes.”
]]>Buddhists pray to the Laughing Buddha requesting for healthy living, good luck, wealth and prosperity; and the Laughing Buddha, as a symbol of motivation, inspires them.
A brief word on the ubiquitous “Laughing Buddha” statues which adorn Chinese establishments the world over.
]]>In recent years the community of Tibetan Buddhists has been agitated by an intense dispute concerning the practice of a controversial deity, Gyel-chen Dor-je Shuk-den. Several Tibetan monks have been brutally murdered, and the Tibetan community in general and the Geluk tradition in particular have become profoundly polarized. […] Why is Shugden so controversial?
An excellent explainer of the Dalai Lama’s antipathy towards this peculiar Gelug protector.
]]>We talk about “Right View” and “Wrong View,” but what we actually have, if we really look at our minds, is confusion!
You can use logic and reason and so on in a destructive manner and if you do that too much, of course, you can get what we’re all familiar with: the kind of modern nihilism and cynicism and all of these kinds of things. That comes from too much of that. So, obviously there needs to be a balance. There needs to be some ability to deconstruct, but that needs to go hand-in-hand with a constructive and a positive approach, so that the deconstruction has a context
]]>Intuition is just a natural function of the mind, that’s all. Sometimes it’s right, sometimes it’s wrong. […] It’s not the infallible voice of God. It’s just a part of us.
There is some sinister hysteria in the air out here tonight, some hint of the monstrous perversion to which any human idea can come.
]]>What should have been a difficult few months turned into 30 years of bloodshed and mayhem in Northern Ireland.
Those in power keep authority through the fair, impartial, and sympathetic application of justice. Where there is no justice, there is no legitimacy. Where there is no legitimacy, there will be no peace.
]]>… there will be resistance to giving the thing rights until it can be seen and valued for itself; yet, it is hard to see it and value it for itself until we can bring ourselves to give it rights — which is almost inevitably going to sound inconceivable
On the history, and future, of how we define property and rights.
]]>We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life
A Holocaust survivor describes the mental hoops he (and many) prisoners jumped through during their trying time so close to death. He concludes that people needed a reason to live, a “will to meaning,” as a necessary core of their psychological health, without which survival was impossible.
In America, the book became wildly popular for its descriptions of life in the German concentration camps and for its feel-good defense of positive thinking and a generic, rationalized, Judeo-Christian spirituality. Personally, I read Frankl’s anecdotes more as a defense of ethical behavior in the face of death less than as a defense of the imagination and its attachments as he imaged. As he himself points out: those survivors most strongly attached to hope where those most strongly disillusioned by their return.
Frankl’s Judeo-Christian lens also prohibited him from engaging in more sober self-analysis in ways that are worth unpacking for what they say about Western culture more broadly. For example, it’s more than a little problematic that Frankl approvingly (!) quotes Nietzsche.
In the final analysis, Man’s Search for Meaning remains a complex classic, as much in need of psychoanalysis as it purports to contain it.
]]>Belief systems and abstract commitments are, of course, indispensable to social change. But when this isolated interiority becomes the sovereign justification for political action, there are only two possible conclusions: either a quietist withdrawal for endless self-reflection or a dangerous willingness to achieve political ends through violent means.
]]>Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.
A classic of modern psychology, Thinking, Fast and Slow explains the two halves of our brain and how they contribute to our sometimes-less-than-rational behavior.
]]>… ask whether it is necessary–or wise–to abandon the field of the emotional sublime to the fascists
]]>Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
A classic collection of essays on the relationship between ideas and society which draws heavily on Huxley’s engagements with Buddhist philosophy.
The product of a bygone era, Ends and Means diagnoses modernity without the despair or self-promotion characteristic of later engagements. One instead feels the vitality and honesty that animated Huxley’s life and continue to inspire readers nearly a century later.
]]>Yeah, we’re locked up in ideas
We like to label everything
Well, I’m just gonna do here
What I gotta do here
‘Cause I gotta keep myself free
A fun anthem on ignoring the haters, and on not taking words too seriously.
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