Civilisation, Buddhism and the Social Ego

Tom Smith: The Bureau of Public Secrets article 'Strong Lessons for Engaged Buddhists' contains a lot of important critiques of Buddhism, from a radical perspective, but it's important not to lose sight of the multi-faceted nature of Buddhist thought. Ultimately, I'd have to side with their conclusion that, aside from any unnecessary baggage, at the very least the philosophy of Buddhism holds a strong "core of genuine insight." Also being a philosophy of the Axial Age, as John Zerzan points out in Twilight of the Machines, it has a tendency to reflect on some of the central issues of civilisation.

This is strongly seen in the following extract from Sogyal Rinpoche's Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (p.121). Essentially, replace the term 'ego' in the following remarkable passage with 'civilisation,' and you'll get to the heart of the millennia of seduction and lies that come with civilised metaphysics.

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In Tibetan ego is called dak dzin, which means "grasping to a self." Ego is then defined as incessant movements of grasping at a delusory notion of "I" and "mine," self and other, and all the concepts, ideas, desires, and activity that will sustain that false construction. Such a grasping is futile from the start and condemned to frustration, for there is no basis or truth in it, and what we are grasping at is by its very nature ungraspable. The fact that we need to grasp at all and go on and on grasping shows that in the depths of our being we know that the self does not inherently exist. From this secret, unnerving knowledge spring all our fundamental insecurities and fear.

So long as we haven't unmasked the ego, it continues to hoodwink us, like a sleazy politician endlessly parading bogus promises, or a lawyer constantly inventing ingenious lies and defenses, or a talk show host talking on and on, keeping up a stream of suave and emptily convincing chatter, which actually says nothing at all.

Lifetimes of ignorance have brought us to identify the whole of our being with ego. Its greatest triumph is to inveigle us into believing its best interests are our best interests, and even into identifying our very survival with its own. This is a savage irony, considering that ego and its grasping are at the root of all our suffering. Yet ego is so convincing, and we have been its dupe for so long, that the thought that we might ever become egoless terrifies us. To be egoless, ego whispers to us, is to lose all the rich romance of being human, to be reduced to a colorless robot or a brain-dead vegetable.

Ego plays brilliantly on our fundamental fear of losing control, and of the unknown. We might say to ourselves: "I should really let go of ego, I'm in such pain; but if I do, what's going to happen to me?"

Ego will chime in, sweetly: "I know I'm sometimes a nuisance, and believe me, I quite understand if you want me to leave. But is that really what you want? Think: If I do go, what's going to happen to you? Who will look after you? Who will protect and care for you like I've done all these years?"

And even if we were to see through ego's lies, we are just too scared to abandon it, for without any true knowledge of the nature of our mind, or true identity, we simply have no other alternative. Again and again we cave in to its demands with the same sad self-hatred as the alcoholic feels reaching for the drink that he knows is destroying him, or the drug addict groping for the drug that she knows after a brief high will only leave her flat and desperate.
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Ego is so clever that it can twist the teachings for its own purposes; after all, "The devil can quote scriptures for his own ends." Ego's ultimate weapon is to point its finger hypocritically at the teacher and his followers and say: No one around here seems to be living up to the truth of the teachings!" Now ego poses as the righteous arbiter of all conduct: the shrewdest position of all from which to undermine your faith, and erode whatever devotion and commitment to spiritual change you have.

[Note: This point on hypocrisy is particularly pertinent for anyone who's ever tried to dialogue on the topics of civilisation or technology. Jibes of "well, you're writing this with technology" or "why don't you go live in the woods then?" are commonplace, yet entirely sidestep the point, without substantially engaging as Sogyal Rinpoche notes.]

Yet however hard ego may try to sabotage the spiritual path, if you really continue on it, and work deeply with the practice of meditation,you will begin slowly to realize just how gulled you have been by ego's promises: false hopes and false fears. Slowly you begin to understand that both hope and fear are enemies of your peace of mind; hopes deceive you, and leave you empty and disappointed, and fears paralyse you in the narrow cell of your false identity. You begin to see also just how all-encompassing the sway of ego has been over your mind, and in the space of freedom opened up by meditation, when you are momentarily released from grasping, you glimpse the exhilarating spaciousness of your true nature. You realize that for years, your ego, like a crazy con artist, has been swindling you with schemes and plans and promises that have never been real and have only brought you to inner bankruptcy. When, in the equanimity of meditation, you see this, without any consolation or desire to cover up what you've discovered, all the plans and schemes reveal themselves as hollow and start to crumble.

A Response to Martin Lewis on Television and India's Plummeting Birth Rate

Tom Smith: Presumably, having cited this blog (here and here) as being foolish enough to speak positively of Jerry Mander, Martin Lewis of Stanford would also be keen to place me in the category of educated people who “have entirely missed” the major development of widespread declines in fertility rates, “instead sticking to erroneous perceptions about inexorable global population growth that continue to fuel panicked rhetoric about everything from environmental degradation and immigration to food and resource scarcity.”

However, this is far from true. In contradistinction to the caricature of “panicked” radical environmentalists Lewis clearly has built up in his mind, I’ve never even written about population growth. Mainly this is because I realise its considerable irrelevance in comparison, for example, to the ecological impact of (low fertility) industrialised nations. And, of course, I acknowledge that the population transition he speaks of is occurring.  

Lacking any hard data, we can only speculate on the prevalence of such beliefs, but I do at least agree with Lewis that an awareness of this drop in fertility rates is surprisingly low. Anecdotally, while I’ve found many environmentalists to be fully aware of the exponential growth of population especially over the last 200 years (I've lost count of the number of times I've heard petri dish analogies), they tend to be much less aware of current and future low-fertility trends.

To sound a note of caution, however, there are two factors Lewis might be underplaying in his article. One is the radical uncertainty of population projections, part of the reason I minimise discussing them. Ehrlich may be criticised as a pessimist in this regard, but it shouldn’t be hidden from view that in 2011 the UN drastically revised up its global population projections. Instead of levelling off at 9 billion by 2050 and then falling, population, they said, is due to reach 10.1 billion by 2100 and subsequently keep growing.

Secondly, the ecological context cannot be forgotten and it’s clear that population levels over the last 150-200 years have been intimately linked with the availability and use of fossil fuels. The growth-based, resource-intensive development model which Lewis would like us to follow faces the double bind of a peak in the oil on which much of the world’s food and transport depends (though the ability to shift to unconventional fossil fuel sources is debatable), and needing to drastically lower CO2 emissions, by leaving the majority of currently identified reserves in the ground. The possibility of maintaining the type of resource-intensive affluence Lewis seeks, in the presence of diminishing fossil fuels, is far from certain. As Wright (2004: p.126) has cautioned:

Sceptics point to earlier predictions of disaster that weren’t borne out. But that is a fool’s paradise. Some of our escapes – from nuclear war, for one – have been more by luck than judgment, and are not final. Other problems have been side-stepped but not solved.

Thankfully, examples such as Kerala in India show us that non-coercive means of fertility rate decline can occur in places with high social well-being and a low (Sundaresan & Patel, 2011) and stable (Fig. 1) environmental impact.

Figure 1: Percentage contribution of CO2 emission by Indian state. Source: Ghoshal & Bhattacharyya (2008)

This, of course, leads us onto Lewis’ argument that television and (more broadly) "modernization" (though the relationship between the two remains unexplored) are what is needed to lower fertility rates. It should be noted at the outset that the data presented by Lewis is utterly static, consisting of snapshots where, for example, time series would be far more informative. It also, at best, indicates correlation, rather than causation.

To fill in the gaps, however, it should be noted that, as late as 2001, only 31% of Indian households owned a television, with that figure standing at just 19% in rural areas[1]. That figure of 19% is highly significant as, to this day, almost three quarters of India’s population is rural. Perhaps there’s enough collective viewing going on to support Lewis’ view, with neighbours travelling miles and packing like sardines into each other’s homes, but this is unlikely given the fact that roughly 70% of the Indian population live in one or two room houses. 

With such low contemporary levels of TV ownership, it would be remarkable if it were having an effect on the fertility rate in India, especially as that rate has been dropping for at least five decades (Fig. 2), preceding any significant level of TV viewership by decades. Indeed, though the prevalence of TVs in India grew significantly between 2001 and 2011, the rate of decline of the fertility rate in fact slowed down. According to World Bank data, fertility levels fell 0.46 between 2001 and 2011, but by a much greater extent of 0.79 between 1991 and 2001.

Figure 2: Indian fertility rate decline. Source: World Bank

Regarding the study  of Brazilian novelas cited in the article, there are numerous caveats left undisclosed. In positing an “association” between fertility rate decline in India and Brazil and TV penetration, it would’ve been helpful for Lewis to at least have noted that Brazil’s rate of TV ownership is high, at 90.9%, effectively three times that of India (31%). 

The study is solely focused on a social phenomenon particular to that country – the novela. Indeed, television became a mass medium in Brazil earlier than in most developing countries, in unusual circumstances relating to the military government of the time. As the authors of the study indicate, Brazilian novelas are unique, costing $125,000 per episode, 15 times more than the other “novela powerhouse” the Mexican Televisa. The authors indicate, moreover, that it’s as much the type of viewing taking place in Brazil, rather than TV exposure in general, which is the key factor. Not only this, but according to the authors “another characteristic of the country that contributes to the impact of television is the high rate of geographical, occupational, and social mobility.” India isn’t known for its occupational and social mobility, still marred by its archaic caste system, and mapping such an idiosyncratic study onto it is imprecise at best.

Lewis shows his true motive towards the end of the article, using his untenably weak thesis regarding TV in India as the basis of a misguided and somewhat incoherent polemic against environmentalists who don’t have unbridled faith in technological solutions. Suddenly we’ve made a leap from TV and fertility, to Jerry Mander and, by association, Vandana Shiva[2].

In his haste to dismiss the normative visions of people like Shiva, at this point in the discussion Lewis glosses over a fundamental contradiction in his argument. He implies that high levels of population growth are “unsustainable” yet fails to admit that it is just as fertility rates have been declining in India, that total CO2 emissions have been rising drastically at 5.7% on average per year, and are due to rise three-fold by 2030.

TV viewership, we can conclude, can and probably does have some impact on fertility rates, but so do many other factors which Lewis is quick to dismiss out of hand based on his static use of statistics. Moreover, fertility rates are not the only social indicators we should be concerned about. Lewis seems to disagree that TV could be “inauthentic, mind numbing, and thought controlling,” or that it could inculcate environment-destroying consumerism. A cursory glance at the recent peer-reviewed literature, however, indicates that TV has been linked with depression (Lucas et al, 2011), obesity (Perez et al, 2011), attention problems (Swing et al, 2010), eating disorders and over-consumption (Strasburger et al, 2010), as well as anxiety (Ibid.). Indeed, a 2012 meta-study in the Archives of Disease in Childhood suggested banning TV for under threes, due to adverse impacts on cognitive development at such a crucial time. All of these factors are associated with the techno-mediated, ecologically-destructive development model which Lewis advocates. Mander's ideas, on the other hand, have simply been backed up by a plethora of studies since he originally wrote Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. 

Ghoshal, T. & Bhattacharyya, R. (2008) State Level Carbon Dioxide Emissions of India 1980-2000, Contemporary Issues and Ideas in Social Sciences. Available from journal.ciiss.net/index.php/ciiss/article/download/60/54

Lucas, M. et al (2011) Relation Between Clinical Depression Risk and Physical Activity and Time Spent Watching Television in Older Women: A 10-Year Prospective Follow-up Study, American Journal of Epidemiology, Vol. 174, No. 9, pp.1017-1027

Perez, A. et al (2011) Physical Activity, Watching Television, and the Risk of Obesity in Students, Texas, 2004-2005, Preventing Chronic Disease, Vol. 8, no. 3

Strasburger, V.C. et al (2010) Health Effects of Media on Children and Adolescents, Pediatrics, Vol. 125, No. 4, pp.756-767

Sundaresan, J. & Patel, L.K. (2011) Climate change impact – A novel initiative for Kerala, Indian Journal of Geo-Marine Sciences, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp.483-486

Swing, E.L et al (2010) Television and Video Game Exposure and the Development of Attention Problems, Pediatrics, Vol. 126, No. 2, pp.214-221

Wright, R. (2004) A Short History of Progress, Toronto: House of Anansi Press

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[1] Though it as of the 2011 census that figure stood at roughly 30%.

[2] Who admittedly has hyperbolic tendencies on the topic of genetic engineering. 

The God Complex: Some Caveats to the Anthropocene

Tom Smith: The Anthropocene seems a very current topic, with The Breakthrough Institute publishing numerous pieces on the topic over the last few months, most recently a piece by Jim Proctor titled (somewhat misleadingly) We Have Never Been Natural. Derrick Jensen too, has suggested we rename it The Age of the Sociopath.  

So here's an essay written a few months ago which falls somewhere along the lines of Jensen's piece - namely that the way the Anthropocene is framed could cause more damage than that which it is supposed to alert us to.

The God Complex: Some Caveats to the Anthropocene

“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.”

                                                                                                  H.L. Mencken (1956: p.247)

The term ‘Anthropocene’ was first coined by geologist Paul Crutzen as an off-the-cuff aside at a conference in the year 2000 (Slaughter, 2012). It designates a proposed new geological epoch in the natural history of the earth, superseding the Holocene, and one which is driven – as the name would suggest - primarily by the impacts of the human species on the planet (Steffen et al, 2011). Very similar concepts however, such as Andrew Revkin’s ‘Anthrocene’ in 1992, had already become increasingly prevalent in the years predating Crutzen’s remark (Ibid.), a trend reaching as far back as 1873 with geologist Antonio Stoppani’s ‘Anthropozoic era’ (Crutzen, 2002).

This essay investigates the Anthropocene not so much as geological fact - for evidence of vast human impacts on the planet is now beyond question[1] (e.g. see Kareiva et al, 2007; Vince, 2011) - but as cultural narrative. We must remember, after all, that as Alfred Korzybski famously stated, “the map is not the territory it represents.” The Anthropocene doesn’t exist as an entity in itself, it isn’t the ice core samples which point towards its existence, and it isn’t parts-per-million of carbon in the atmosphere. It’s a part of the social imaginary, a part of the maps and stories we create and repeat to ourselves.

There are many analyses which could be drawn from stories surrounding the Anthropocene. For example, the implication posited by Patomaki & Steger (2010) is that the Anthropocene concept is one of the ‘Big History’ narratives which “logically lead to envisioning the place of ‘us’ in the framework of ‘global’, ‘planetary’ or even ‘cosmic’ time and space...Thus a whole range of new prototypes and metaphors become plausible, most importantly a sense of global belonging – the Earth as ‘our home’”. As traditional dyads such as nature/culture, local/global and science/politics are deconstructed by events characterising the Anthropocene such as climate change (Clark, 2010), there is a drive towards a cosmopolitan outlook coupled with a questioning of the fundamental assumptions which characterise modernity.

My Environmentalism Will Be Radical Or It Will Be Bullshit! The State of Irish Environmentalism

Tom Smith: 

“I don’t know about you, but whenever I attend some “green” conference, I know I’m supposed to leave feeling inspired and energized, but instead I feel heartbroken, discouraged, defeated, and lied to.” – Derrick Jensen

A pointed and unequivocal feminist phrase has been doing the rounds recently, which I’d like to build on here. It goes, “my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit!”

After sitting through seven hours of disjointed, liberal environmentalist thinking at a National University Environmental Forum in University College Cork yesterday (albeit disjointed thinking being done by some very caring people), I just came away feeling like shouting “My environmentalism will be radical or it will be bullshit!”

Stay with me while I explain why.

The line-up, which had some nationally-prominent speakers, went like this:

Eamon Ryan, the leader of the Irish Green Party, opened with a keynote speech. This was followed by a couple of presentations on “Environmental Activism and the Media” by John Gibbons, blogger at thinkorswim.ie and former regular in the Irish Times, and Oisin Coughlan the Director of Friends of the Earth Ireland. There was a break in proceedings for presentations by various primary and secondary schoolchildren who participate in the ubiquitous Green Schools programme. The final segment was a discussion on “Food Waste, Global Food Production and Climate Change” featuring Dr. Colin Sage from the Department of Geography, UCC, and Colum Gibson of stopfoodwaste.ie.

First of all, as is symptomatic of modern environmentalists, this was a conference concerned with humans, humans, humans, and climate change. Very rarely do environmentalists any more even feign to mention species loss, whales, biodiversity, rainforests, lifeless oceans, a sense of place and home or, heaven forbid, systemic and philosophical issues like capitalism, civilisation, anthropocentrism, separation or alienation.

An Exploration of the Parallels Between Permaculture and Daoism

Tom Smith: Here's an essay dealing with permaculture, civilization, agriculture and the ancient Chinese philosophy of daoism (commonly known as Taoism in the West).  Notes and bibliography are found right at the bottom.

The links between these areas and a critique of civilization are, in my opinion, very real. For example, John Zerzan has referred to Permaculture as one possible transitional tool in the move away from civilization, while he has also  spoken of Daoism not unfavourably, as the essay below will show. 

Self-So and Self-Sow: An Exploration of the Parallels between Permaculture and Daoism

“The increasing desolation of nature, the exhaustion of resources, the uneasiness and disintegration of the human spirit, all have been brought about by humanity’s trying to accomplish something. Originally there was no reason to progress, and nothing that had to be done. We have come to the point at which there is no other way than to bring about a “movement” not to bring anything about.”

                                                                                                 Masanobu Fukuoka (1978: p.158)

Daoism, according to Nelson (2009: p.294), “offers a philosophical basis for a non-reductive naturalistic ethics in the widest sense of these words.” However, Wawrytko (2005) points out that philosophical daoism, even when deemed to be of ecological relevance[1], suffers consistent denials that its principles can be implemented in practice.  Using core tenets of daoism, such as wu wei and ziran, this essay shall argue that permaculture – first established in Australia but now with a worldwide presence – is a transformative practice with its roots found firmly in daoist thought.  Initially, some reasons for arguing that permaculture is not an adequate reflection of dao, are discussed and problematised. Then, reasons are outlined for arguing that permaculture is in fact a remarkably widespread expression of (daoist) philosophy as a way of life in the 21^st century.

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Permaculture, somewhat like dao, is a non-static concept which is difficult, to the point of being impossible, to define in text [2]. It was, however, founded in the 1970s by two Australians, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, as “an integrated, evolving system of perennial or self-perpetuating plant and animal species useful to man” (Holmgren, 2002; p.xix).

The term itself was initially a contraction of permanent agriculture, indicating a new[3] perennial polycultural form of food production[4], contrasted with the short-lived, core annual crops such as wheat, rice and corn, the big three which now comprise the majority of the world’s calorific intake (Bruinsma, 2003).

Conventional annual-based agriculture (be it organic or chemical-based), is posited in permaculture thought to be a leading historical cause of ecological destruction and civilisational collapse, depending as it does on anthropocentric subjugation of the natural world, natural habitat destruction and expropriation, de-forestation, release of soil carbon through ploughing, leaching of soil nutrients from exposed topsoil and other impacts (Diamond, 2006; Dale & Gill Carter, 1955; Ponting, 1991; Holmgren, 2011). As Dale and Gill Carter (1955:p.3) state, “with the progress of civilization, man has learned many skills, but only rarely has he learned to preserve his source of food. Paradoxically, the very achievements of civilized man have been the most important factors in the downfall of civilizations.” Along this line of thought, leading permaculture writer and teacher, Toby Hemenway (2006), provocatively titled one of his essays with the question “Is Sustainable Agriculture an Oxymoron?”

Darwin's Election Campaign and The Hidden Truth of Creationism

Tom Smith: A few days ago, Charles Darwin came second in an election for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. He received more than 4,000 write-in-votes in protest against the unopposed campaign of Republican Paul Broun who gave a speech in September denouncing the big bang theory and evolution as "lies straight from the pit of hell". Along with this he believes that the earth is 9,000 years old, and was created in six days.



While this is just the latest atheist/creationist spat to come out of the U.S., it does at least lead one to ponder, however, about what creationism has to tell us about our civilised culture. We could say, for example, that  on one level Paul Broun and other creationists aren't actually all that far removed from most anti-Judaeo-Christian segments of the population. To creationists and most people growing up in the confines of civilised narratives (including atheists) the world - or at least the element that matters - is only about 8,000-10,000 years old. Let's not forget, after all, that theism is a direct product of agricultural societies - and both date to the time that Paul Broun states.

Lately, on this topic, I've taken to drawing a metre-long line for people of all religious beliefs and ethnicities, and telling them that each centimetre represents 1% of our species time on the planet. I then ask them to mark where along this line they think farming/civilisation/writing/cities arise. Without exception (and remember that this is after at least 14 years of supposedly scientific and objective 'education' in school) they put the mark towards the start of the metre-long line, presuming that humans have been civilised as long as they've existed as a species. This is complete revisionism, ignoring the vast majority of our species' history. Of course, it provokes shock and denial in people when you place the true mark in the confines of the last 1% of the metre.

Such poor knowledge is clear across all spectra of society including, I would posit, those who wrote Darwin down on their ballots in protest against creationism. So yes, it is absurd to believe that a man created the world in six days, but is it not equally so to be convinced that humanity didn't exist outside of civilisation? This is surely a key element in holding together our Stockholm Syndrome-like beliefs that, despite 10,000 years of almost incessant famine, disease and war, that there is no alternative to civilisation. "Don't bite the hand that feeds you" the apologists say, while forgetting that most of the world in that 1% of our species history actually hasn't been fed by anyone or anything, that starvation was a regular occurrence. That it's only in the last 150 years - two lifetimes - with the drawing down of millions of years of solar energy in the form of fossil fuels that the majority of any part of the planet (remembering that the ruling minority have always been so safe) has escaped the jaws of hunger for any prolonged period of time.

Anti-creationists are always posing the necessity of critical thinking and objectivity. Perhaps they should examine the genesis of their own beliefs first.

On Eliminating TV - Jerry Mander Had It Right All Along

Tom Smith: A few months ago I put up a synopsis of Jerry Mander's book Four Reasons for the Elimination of Television.

Now, interesting research has come out in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, which leads the author to conclude that under-3s should be kept away from the TV completely, with older children and young adults severely curtailing their viewing (currently, the average US teenager spends 8 hours looking at screens at home every day, not including school usage).

The author of the review, Dr. Aric Sigman indicates that the first three years are crucial for brain growth and "that is when babies and small children need to interact with their parents, eye to eye, and not with a screen."

Prof. Mitch Blair questions the headlong advance of experience-mediating technologies: "Whether it's mobile phones, games consoles, TVs or laptops, advances in technology mean children are exposed to screens for longer amounts of time than ever before. We are becoming increasingly concerned, as are paediatricians in several other countries, as to how this affects the rapidly developing brain in children and young people."

Towards the end of the article we hear from Justine Roberts of Mumsnet stating that it's hard for parents to compete with technology. "It would be great if someone could invent a lock that could automatically ensure a daily shut down of all the different devices in and around the home after a designated period. Until such a thing is invented, it's going to be an ongoing battle to keep on top of everything".

So, this leads back to the question of how neutral and inert technology really is. Advocates of the techno-system argue that things like TV are 'just neutral tools', to be used by intelligent humans as we so choose. Roberts statement would indicate that in the case of electronics technologies, it's far more more complex than that.