Non-Buddhism

An antidote to stupidity for an ever, never present mind.

By Matthew O’Connell* 

There are myriad ways to look at and evaluate our present moment with the best of them informed by a strong commitment to thinking beyond the obsessions and revulsions of our age and their gobbiest proponents. Pertinent to this is the term lens, which has moved out of academia and taken up home in the general consciousness of late. In doing so, it has promoted a positional stance that has spread into ever more areas of human life, leading to highly selective takes on reality, curated by algorithms, and pushed by the most vocal elites on both sides of the political aisle. At the same time, identity politics lingers on as the politics of choice. All this as the hyper-individualism of late modernity comes up against the general decline of the West and its now dead fantasy of the end of history and the inevitability of progress. The unconscious defence mechanism of societies rooted in two party states to the speed of change and decline has been a retreat into division and ideologically formed enclaves of the good and the bad, the evil and the holy, with all its hidden payoffs and a dark underbelly fed by a potpourri of resentments. 

The Right laments the loss of a world that no longer exists and the imagined certainties that world provided, while it continues to desire autonomy for its own economic privilege from the wider world of humans and other animals. The Left works to distract itself from the challenges to its core axiom of progress, progress, progress by obsessing over details, playing language games, and fighting minor battles in the belief theirs is the utopian future to come. Both do all this while ignoring the screams for large scale change from wider society that divisive brands of identity politics are not fit for. Nowhere is this tension more visible than in the United States, but its cousin across the pond has not been too shabby either in its struggles with the winds of change, and versions of the dysfunction can be found in many highly developed western countries. As old political and ideological divisions collapse, the world might be usefully differentiated not between the most vocal ideologues on social media feeding the excitement of remunerative resentment for their side, but by those committed to thinking beyond divisional capture and digital rapture. Our world needs so much more from us than we are currently close to giving and the force of our localised forms of collective stupidity are pushing us in exactly the wrong direction. 

This post is not about global politics, national politics or even the culture wars. It is about the need to move onwards from unthinking adherence to group identities, ideological capture and anti-intellectualism, and engage the part of the practising life that confronts avidya. Lenses are not the problem of course. Rather, the intellectual class which trades in their epistemic dissemination in service to those three distorted purposes are. Those who teach the multiplicity of things, the value of the undervalued or present disruptions to received norms would ideally teach such insights responsibly rather than indoctrinate, capture and employ. Lenses are symptomatic of the wealth of ways we have of perceiving and interpreting the world around us after all and their plurality should be taken as a launch pad into the wealth of intellectual and perceptual materials our species is privy to and not as an ideological division of the world into yet another imagined landscape of the good and the bad. In such impoverished usages, lenses are traded as morally hierarchical and adopted as features of group identity and affiliation to partisan moral causes. They thus morph into blinkered forms of perception and feeling rather than intellectual growth, stunting the capacity of their wearers to grow as thinkers and perceivers.

When seen in the context of the Great Feast, lenses are like cutlery: a basic tool for engaging with intellectual materials, cultivating insights and opportunities to practise viewing from the many places. At the same time, lenses are symptomatic of the consumerist, personally tailored realities that represent the meeting point between identity politics as reactionary politics and the hyperreal state of online culture and its fashioning of lenses in service to utopias and dystopias. In this, they present on the one hand opportunities for deception and capture, on the other, opportunities for cultivating intelligence in service to our broad intellectual history and the many ancestors who came before us. They thus represent a split between the possibility of wisdom, as open-ended, thoughtful plurality, and ignorance as intellectual slavery, conformity, and confinement.

The paradox we find ourselves in currently is one of a never-ending supply of information, data, and easy answers accompanied by an increasing incapacity amongst the general population to think, evaluate and learn beyond sloganeering and the parroting of second-hand thought; and an intellectual class that has signed over much of its ability to think critically to ideological conformity in fear of job loss and status destruction. They are supported by parasitic elements made up of grifters, agitators, and bullies egging on self-destructive urges, or the desire to push resentment towards revolution. In this scenario, it is not such card-carrying intellectuals who are going to provide a way out of the mess we are in, especially when many of them are contributors to the stupidity of the “don’t think movement” and its demands for adherence to ideological slogans, or else! Though this is most visible online, specifically within the abyss that is social media, it is present in the cultural products of the ageing Gods of television, the printed press, News anchors, half-hearted political debates and rancid talk shows. 

The practising life

Mentioning all this in the context of the practising life serves the purpose of reminding ourselves that we cannot escape the wider social reality we are situated in. Access to the human world we inhabit is opened and closed by our capacity to engage it and the intellectual rules of the groups we align with shape its access points. Thinking our world means avoiding the allure of this moment’s obsessions and specific groups’ management of them, yet operating at an appropriate distance from those obsessions to avoid becoming yet another reactionary subject or recluse. The problems we face are resonant with the long history of complex social organisations after all; they just happen to be coked up in our hyperreal present. The themes that characterise our moment are old and new and the callers for obedience to their lens and its truths and its methods are repeating history as much as those condemned for not being awoke enough, or for being “Postmodern Marxists”; just to name a couple of our lovely, modern day insults. 

Seeing the enforcers of ideological lenses as caught in deep tribal urges to belong and fight against the imagined other in new religious struggles is helpful for avoiding getting lost in the fine details of critique and the intellectual aloofness afforded by it. The hyperreal world we live in is so vast in its obsessions and mutating at such speed that a full critique will never emerge and believing you have the definitive description is more of the same old Laurellian decision. We are better equipped to understand our world and our place in it as practitioners if we view from many places, accumulate lenses, and seek underlying dysfunctions in the plural – the more rooted in our mammalian nature, the better, for so much of our current age is the next chapter in a long history of denying our material existence and animal selves. Seeing the digital experiment we are all in as hyperreal disembodiment is a helpful thought experiment. It can help us delineate and give definition to the collective hallucinations that make up much of our public sphere and the absurdities that spring from them. 

The good versus bad lens dichotomy is resisted by engaging the practising life as a vast plane of richness, for it encourages us to see all forms of thought as theory and practice materials that are works in progress: this is simple to say, but the allure of certainty too often has us drifting from one set of certainties to another in the search for final answers, even when we think we are above such things. We may couch our intellectual pursuits in the language of visitation but the background desire lusts after permanence. Intellectuals caught up in the demands of academic life are inevitably swayed by their intellectual preferences and the demands of their trade – Laruelle’s decision operates even in the most open of minds. Intellectuals writing from an intellectual persona are wedded to perspectives of reliable thought that confirm their identity and its role in a complex set of necessary relations – such an observation is not a criticism per se but an invitation to change tack. To think at the margins is to seek out what is being lost in the fervour of certainty, not assert a position against it to linger in. It is to commit to consistently shrugging off the pull from the world around you that says join us in our fervour and convictions: Come to our tribe for the guarantees you seek. 

Don’t be the thought you wish to see in the world

To enact theory, is to engage in a set of identifiable actions rooted in axioms that cannot be final, but merely way stations for thinking and practising. Ideological capture is the antithesis of this: it knows and speaks from axioms as given truths that are final. To neutralise the hierarchy and snobbery of the theories that dominate the imaginations of those around us is not to deny their power, or deny they may have a fundamental role to play, but rather to acknowledge theories for their place as mere human means for grappling with a complex world that is always too great for the theory to contain, capture or explain in its entirety. Theories are always imperfect. To treat them as otherwise is to slip into the convictions of unlaboured thought.

The response must be to think better and cultivate lucidity; think into spaces unknown, perhaps consider cultivating an intimate relationship with our ancestral, intellectual inheritance – stay connected to the great body of this Earth as our material home and from which our physical body emerges and locates itself. To think from the body is a revolutionary act in our disembodied age. Our basic state of consciousness locates itself in borders, imagined and real; the first necessarily being our physical form. Contemplation as cultivation can involve taking thought as relational expansion into and over those borders. Ideally, for Buddhist adjacent folk like you reading this, Sloterdjikian affiliates (as some of you may also be), and practitioners of forms that must be mentioned in hushed tones in intellectual circles, better thought will accompany training in the ability to perceive and experience, feel and note, without being caught too fully in the emotional force of reactivity and the feeling habits of confirmation bias. For diners at the Great Feast, savouring the meal in unhurried appreciation is the recommended approach to eating and drinking of the wonders of our human ancestors. Thinking and contemplation are bedfellows after all and the sort of thought that is fertile finds the sweet spot between rational, logical analysis, and intuitive, imaginative contemplation. 

To this end, I wish to propose that we construct a menu of sorts that will help us to remember to think better whilst providing a sort of curriculum for the non-professionally trained intellectual; the sort of person who is intelligent, but does not have a PhD in their back pocket, or a Masters in Philosophy. A menu that is rooted in our intellectual heritage as a species, made as rich as our palate can manage, and open to regular revision and expansion as we become familiar with new ingredients, and unexpected combinations of those ingredients into new menu items. We have so many quick fix gurus claiming ten bits of this or that will solve your problems and resolve the great existential questions. I think we can do better and cease to turn every bit of useful advice into a best-selling, quick fix, self-help tome from some American dude with too much certainty and over-confident promises designed to make money off. The items I propose below seem an appropriate start for our current moment of madness. For the learned amongst you, some of it may seem sophomoric, but the themes are so universal to our species that it is hard to imagine any of you have any of them fully figured out. 

You should do your part and add to the menu too 

Avoid quoting names and books unless the specifics are particularly helpful, for who has time to read every book out there and this is not a project for academics in their field. In my experience, being provided with the core items of a given topic, field, dispute, debate and theory along with its opposition is more than sufficient to get folks heading off into rich spaces of thought. What would you add to a menu of Great Feast appetisers, first courses, side dishes and mains? Would you make yours an elitist restaurant, three Michelin stars for example, or one open to families and odd couples? I lack the intellectual chops to do anything but present a buffet of sorts, where people can pick and mix, and take as much as they feel prepared to eat. 

The practice items I am pitching as essential are presented as menu items. They can be tasted and tested and applied to all forms of certainty, alliances, convictions, doubts, and partisan commitment. Ideally they are applied to many spheres, both personal and social – this is practice, right? They become tools to think alongside existing events and for analysis and unpacking. They can be DIY materials to handle, touch, feel and work on, or materials to engage others in. Oh, and before we progress to the menu. Don’t forget the intermittent fasting: fashionable of late but very helpful for restoring epistemic humility as a monthly ritual, so as not to get too lost in the dining experience that all you can do is dine. 

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* Matthew Joseph O’Connell is founder of the blog Post-Traditional Buddhism and co-founder, along with Stuart Baldwin, of the New Books Network podcast Imperfect Buddha (“going where other Buddhist podcasts fear to tread”). Twitter. Facebook. He also offers coaching “for Buddhists and ex-Buddhists who wish to find balance and evolve their practice” and beyond.

See Matthew’s other posts on SNB:
* Realizing Awakened Consciousness:
* Interviews with Buddhist Teachers;
* Buddhism, Mindfulness, Neoliberalism;
* You Need Non-Practice!
* Interview with the Imperfect Buddha Podcast

Image: From: Zachary Fruhling, “Three Arguments Against Identity Politics.”