This article addresses an issue of growing political importance: the global rise of civilizational populism. From Western Europe to India and Pakistan, and from Indonesia to the Americas, populists are increasingly linking social belonging with civilizational identity—and at times to the belief that the world is divided into religion-based civilizations, some of which are doomed to clash with one another.

The belief that one’s religion trumps other faiths precipitates the stance that it trumps science too. This psychological process is most likely to operate in regions or countries with low religious heterogeneity.

How a lack of religious diversity in a place engenders fundamentalism.

Early texts, like the Vimalaprabhā or the Lam yig of Man luṅ pa, do not describe Śambhala as a paradise on earth. They rather stress the spiritual qualities of the country and its inhabitants. Later works, especially the smon lam, the most popular texts on Śambhala among the Tibetan and Mongolian Buddhist lay people, concentrate on the paradisiac nature of the hidden kingdom.

The paper explores how the Tibetan Buddhist vision of Śambhala functions as both a utopian ideal and political symbolism. It traces the myth’s evolution from spiritual paradise to political metaphor, compares it with European utopian traditions, and cites key Tibetan and Mongolian sources.

Science and scientists can learn much from religion when it comes to how to deal with scientific fundamentalism.

He’d accidentally gone into climate-rant mode instead of speaking as a dad.

The apocalyptic stakes of climate change cause one Seattle father to go over the edge along with the story of a technique Santa Fe uses to put its glooms to rest.

While we do find that reputation inspires punish-ment that is sometimes unreflective, we also find that people correctly believe that engaging with opposing perspectives will be perceived positively by others. Thus, by giving people opportunities to broadcast their engagement with other viewpoints, it may actually be possible to leverage reputation to motivate more careful deliberation.

Aesthetic beauty is as much about how (and whether) you look as what you see. From the cork to the supernova, wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply: our willingness to do the work that awe requires.

John Green reviews these two related phenomena on a five-star scale.

We found that participants tended to have more similar self-views post-conversation than pre-conversation, an effect we term “inter-self alignment.” Further, the more two partners’ self-views aligned, the more they enjoyed their conversation and were inclined to interact again. This effect depended on both conversation partners becoming aligned. These findings suggest that the way we see ourselves is coauthored in the act of dialogue

Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains.

Rousseau thought that it was polite society that made people evil and that a sufficiently enlightened social order could bring out people’s inherent virtues.

How this 18th century philosopher’s ideas came to dominate modern political thought.

It was what most Germans wanted—or, under pressure, came to want. They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.
I came back home a little afraid for my own country: afraid of what it might want, and get…

An American journalist befriends ten Nazis after World War 2 in order to understand what drove so many Germans to The Party.

Western philosophers did not hand down a rich tradition of thinking about animal consciousness. But Eastern thinkers have long been haunted by its implications— especially the Jains…

Mendicants, when what exists, because of grasping what and insisting on what, does the view arise: ‘The one who acts does nothing wrong…’

Clinging to different aggregates yields very different philosophies, but all trend towards moral nihilism.

Idea systems could be drawn from or embedded in the worlds of art, sciences, politics, or religion. The logics that tie an idea system’s components together can be as diverse as the ways that humans can think. Structurally speaking, the following set of mechanisms are fundamental for an idea system to operate: coherence mechanisms, defense mechanisms, adaptive mechanisms, and communicative-cognitive mechanisms.

A scholarly analysis of how ideologies develop and operate with a particular emphasis on their social function. Three case studies are analyzed in depth: the European witch hunts of the early modern period, Mao’s Communist Revolution in 20th-century China, and Bush’s “War on Terror” in the 21st-century United States. Commonalities are discussed and theorized along with some thoughts on what “fair-minded” people might do with this understanding to keep a level head in turbulent times.

For an interview with the author about the book, see the New Books Network episode.

Identities are something extremely useful to humans. Holding a particular identity makes it easier to do difficult, unrewarding things associated with that identity.

To the person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This reflects the way in which, when that hammer comes into that circuit of mind, body, and world, it transforms how the world appears to us or what it makes us see the world as.

We’ve structured modern life in such a way that it’s easy to say ‘this isn’t my fault,’ that the machine made me do it…

They looked generic. Yet a fangirl still exists in contradiction to the dominant culture. She’s not considered normal or sane…

The definitive history of the One Direction Fandom.

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.

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.”

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.

… 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.

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.

The mind of man is capable of anything.

A British novel about the “horrors” of colonialism and what Europeans thought about them.

For more about this classic novel, see (for example) the Writ Large Episode on the book and its history.

… 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

… 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.

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.

… 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 imagined. As he himself points out: those survivors most strongly attached to hope were 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.

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.