The theocons are not done with their rebellion. One of their more prominent advocates, Cardinal Raymond Burke, crossed an obvious line last week:
At this very critical moment, there is a strong sense that the Church is like a ship without a helm, whatever the reason for this may be; now, it is more important than ever to examine our faith, have a healthy spiritual leader and give powerful witness to the faith.
Last weekend Australian Cardinal George Pell unnecessarily reminded his congregants not only that Pope Francis is the 266th Pope, but also that “history has seen 37 false or antipopes.” Antipopes? Does Cardinal Pell intend to hint that Francis isn’t a true Pope? Was Cardinal Pell not there when Francis was elected?
“I am very glad that the Usus antiquus [the traditional Latin Mass] now lives in full peace within the Church, also among the young, supported and celebrated by great Cardinals,” wrote Pope Emeritus Benedict to Cardinal Burke, [after being invited by Burke to a Latin rite]. Vatican expert Sandro Magister points out today that in writing thus, Pope Benedict is including Cardinal Burke among ‘great Cardinals’ even though Pope Francis is set to deny him both a role in the curia and the leadership of a diocese.
I’m just struck by how adamant the right is when no longer fully in power. After decades in which moderate Catholics struggled on under far more conservative Popes, the theocons threaten revolt even against a hugely popular Pope, because he has … initiated a conversation. The obedience they preached is not exactly what they are now practicing, is it?
Meanwhile, it’s time for our monthly report card. Revenue was up cyclically (see the monthly data from March this year below), even as subscriptions remain at around 30,000 (30,170 as of today):
Traffic was solid and stable: 705,000 unique visitors; 5.3 million pageviews. Total subscription revenue for the entire year is now $906K. Year 2 is well on track to bring in more revenues than Year 1. Thanks to all of you who made that possible.
And see you in the morning.
(Photo: Two thousand sheep pass through the city center of Madrid, Spain, on November 2, joined by shepherds, marking the annual livestock migration festival which has taken place in the Spanish capital since 1994. By Denis Doyle/Getty Images.)
For the reader who says that you can’t arrive at the position that the self doesn’t exist by argument, in fact the Gelug lineage of Tibetan Buddhists (the one in which the Dalai Lama belongs) believes that not only is logic helpful in this endeavour, it is essential. You must first convince yourself of the logic underlying the no self position before meditating on it. They liken it to taking a horse through a race course before a race. And the logic used, based on Tsongkhapa’s interpretation of Nagarjuna’s Introduction to the Middle Way, is extremely convincing. A great summary of it can be found in Guy Newland’s Introduction to Emptiness. The Dalai Lama’s How to See Yourself as You Really Are is a bit more bare bones.
However, I do agree with the reader that you and most of your other readers are misunderstanding what the absence of self infers. It doesn’t mean a zombie-like annihilation of personality. It simply means recognizing that the thought “me” refers to something that you believe to exist inherently, whereas nothing can be said to exist inherently. There is still a “me”, it’s just that it exists moment to moment. For a good discussion of this, listen to this Philosophy Bites podcast on a possible connection between Hume and Tsongkhapa. As to how the belief in an inherently existing self dominates our day-to-day existence, check out the YouTube video [seen above] by Sakyong Mipham, spoken word artist and son of Chogyam Trunkpa.
Another reader flags a recent podcast between Sam Harris and Joseph Goldstein:
Another practicing Buddhist:
The question of “does the self exist” troubled me for several years before I came to a place of peace. Buddhism says that nothing exists in a permanent state – the whole of reality is in a constant state of change. The English word used to describe this within Buddhist circles is Impermanence. Mountains erode, water evaporates, molecules change composition over time, and even the cells of our body are being replaced.
It was easy to see this when I looked at external things. My trouble was that I felt like no matter what my childhood memory was, “I” had always been there, and “I” would be here tomorrow too. After all, who is experiencing these things, if it’s not “me?” And so I struggled through meditation and reading the dharma, adhering to the Buddha’s advice to rigorously test every proposition put forth in the writings.
This impasse was finally broken when I began to realize that I was taking the first part – “not existing” – and ignoring the second part – “in a permanent state.”
The self, like the mountain, is a creation of forces outside it, subject to new forces every day that change its shape in varying degrees. From one small, indefinable moment to the next, the mountain, and the self, are different. We may build upon the past, or we may have a part of ourselves chipped away, but there is no part of us, or the mountain, that is safe from the expanses of time. We may maintain residues from previous experiences, and we may get new things heaped upon us. I will never forget my wife’s first miscarriage, or the death of my close high school friend, or the first time I kissed a girl, or the moment my daughter was born. But even these memories are constantly shaped and reshaped by new experiences and reflections. They happened to “me,” and they continue to happen to a different “me” every time I think about them.
When I stopped fearing my own “non-existence” and instead embraced how different life events had and would continue to shape me, the world slowly opened up. New tragic experiences are no less tragic, but a calming peace is generally present in spite of acute suffering. Somehow life seems a bit less sad.
Another connects the idea of the self not truly existing to my own attachment to Christian moral ideas:
As a former Catholic, I can identify with much of where you’re coming from in your writing, particularly with your fierce sense of morality. What I want to say here is that the idea that there is no inherently existing self is completely compatible with Christian belief. There is still a dependently arisen self from moment to moment that experiences things and acts with moral agency in the world.
On the other hand, saying as you do that the self is filled with God’s love and becomes more itself is fundamentally illogical. On the absolute level, in this present moment, there is nothing to become. There is no target to hit that has somehow been existing forever outside this moment. There is only you, as you are, right now, the you that exists in dependence upon all your previous moments. From a Christian point of view, where this takes us is particularly liberating, because it means that you can change. Given the right causes and conditions (the right training), you can develop more compassion, more love, more tolerance and so on, specifically because your self is empty of inherent existence. To paraphrase the great Nagarjuna, it is only because there is no inherently existing self that morality, even Christian morality, can work.
One more Buddhist:
I’m really enjoying your discussion of Sam Harris’ book, not so much because Harris has discovered something new, but because he talks about things seldom mentioned outside of Buddhist or Advaitic estoerica, which is my personal habitat. Still, he misses a few things, particularly because his agenda is to create a scientific-rationalist version of Buddhism for the modern West. I even approve of such efforts, but in his discussion of the notion of no-self in Dzogchen and Buddhism, he’s really missing the primary point.
In Buddhism, the doctrine of no-self is a major element of the overall viewpoint that is called “dependent origination”. In this view, all suffering begins with ignorance of our true nature, and proceeds from there to create a recurring loop of experience that cycles through all sorts of stages and realms of mind and body and cosmos, endlessly feeding upon itself in a kind of circular logical progression, like a snake biting its own tail. The entirety of the Buddhist teaching is aimed at breaking this cycle built on ignorance, so that the whole thing unravels, and all these illusions fall apart.
Understanding dependent origination in the most visceral of terms is the primary method for breaking this chain of ignorance. Thus, the very process by which this illusion of a personal, separate self is created, also becomes our primary weapon for breaking it down by interrupting that cycle at various key junctures. Because it is so dependent on each link in the chain moving on to the next, any break in the chain causes the whole thing to collapse. The teaching on no-self hits one of those junctures, and by gaining insight into the reality that we have no real intrinsic self, the whole chain of dependent assumptions built on that begins to fall apart.
However, it needs to be said that Buddha did not emphasize focusing on the “illusory personal self” link in the chain, in part because it was so subtle and hard to experientially relate to. Instead, he focused on things much more tangible and real to us: our felt sufferings and cravings. These two elements of the chain of dependent origination are much easier to relate to than abstract notions of a personal self, something it is hard not to simply take for granted. In fact, what Buddha generally pointed out is that what we call a “self” is really just a collection of desires, cravings, and sufferings, or our general sense of dissatisfaction. From all those desires and cravings, our personal sense emerges, as a reflection of our ignorance about these things.
That’s what the Four Noble Truths directly address: not no-self, but dukkha, or the pervasive sense of dissatisfaction and suffering that we cannot seem to escape except through temporary and partial respites; and tanha, or craving, the intense and unavoidable burning desire for escape from that feeling of dissatisfaction. These are things we can immediately relate to, without any abstraction or conceptual thought, whereas this ephemeral self-sense is much harder to find or maintain an approach towards.
The message that the Buddha really wanted to get across was a very visceral one: that our dissatisfaction and the craving for release from dissatisfaction drive all our sufferings in an endless loop, and they even create a corresponding self-sense that feels perpetually depleted, unhappy, and impossibly trapped in an existential cycle that seems inescapable, and thus we mistakenly conclude that the best we can do is find temporary pleasures or respites from this, and find ways to manage or minimize the inevitable sufferings.
Buddha’s revolutionary teaching was that contrary to what seems to be the case, there’s actually a way out of this, which is to see the whole picture of dependent origination, and to stop playing at that game at the most obvious places in that chain. Stop all activity based on craving for satisfaction for this illusory personal self. Stop chasing phantom pleasures and solutions and fantasies of relief and salvation. Stop believing in the nonsense our cravings lead us to believe in. That’s what meditation boils down to, and why it is so beneficial to us, if we do it as the Buddha recommended. Not as a way to fulfill our cravings for satisfaction, but as a respite from the endless cycles of craving for satisfaction that so torture us. In an odd way, a great bliss seems to naturally arise when we stop craving personal satisfaction. As the Buddha once said:
No earthly pleasure
No heavenly bliss
Equals one infinitesimal fraction
Of the bliss of the cessation of craving.
What Dzogchen and other direct approaches to meditation do is not a form of esoteric magic, it is simply break in this cycle, in which we cease to feed our mind and body’s craving for personal satisfaction, which drives most of us most of the time. Even a short moment of respite from this cycle produces great benefits of relief and relaxation that show us that there’s a real life beyond the craven pattern we have assumed to be necessary to our existence. And that’s what meditation is really all about; not merely some sort of good feeling that comes from sitting quietly, but a cessation of the ignorant activity that keeps us running like hamsters on the wheel of craving.
But even that relief can become something we crave and try to hold onto and conceptualize about and make the basis for a new, more spiritual self. Even science is simply something we can misuse as a better, more logical means to satisfy our cravings for a better self. And sometimes I think that’s what Sam is after, rather than freedom from craving itself. As if by holding onto this genuine insight, he can find some kind of actual satisfaction of his more ordinary craven mind’s desires. He’s certainly not alone in this; it’s part of the whole pattern to be understood, but it’s not enough to merely grasp, even experientially, the truth of no-self. One must also understand the much more obvious truths of craving and suffering.
That’s the hard part of Buddhism, because we all have our cravings and our personal needs for satisfaction, and we expect even Buddhism or meditation to address these and give us that satisfaction, just in a deeper and more effective way. But Buddhism says no, don’t fall for that trap either. Just sit – even sit in that total sense of frustration and lack of satisfaction and unfulfilled craving. Let that burn you up, until it burns itself out. That, then, is enlightenment. The cessation of that craving, that has been allowed to burn itself out, is the definition of Nirvana. That’s not the end of life; it’s in reality the beginning of real life, a life based on reality rather than the cycles of craving. It turns out that suffering depends entirely on that cycle keeping itself going, and so when it collapses, not only does our sense of personal, separate self burn out, but so does our suffering. The heart itself breaks open.
Follow the whole Book Club discussion here. And join in by emailing your thoughts to bookclub@andrewsullivan.com.
I watched two decent documentaries on the Islamic State this weekend – long overdue. The Frontline version is pretty tough on the Obama administration – in part because they start the story the day US forces formally left the country, rather than when the US first arrived. And so you see only half the picture. The implication is that Obama squandered the multi-sectarian “success” of the surge, took his eye off the ball, and allowed sectarianism a comeback.
But if your core analysis of the clusterfuck is that we removed a Sunni government of a majority Shia country after decades of Sunni brutality, then surely, Shiite revenge, in various forms, was always inevitable. Some occurred in the horrific sectarian cleansing under the US occupation – but it was met with just as savage Sunni violence and, of course, a resilient, murderous Sunni insurgency as well. In the aftermath, it would have taken a miracle of Mandela-like magnitude for a Shiite majority government, once in power and free of foreign occupation, not to exact some kind of revenge or act out of a deep sense of paranoia about the Sunnis; and it would have taken another miracle for such acts not to have been answered in turn.
And they weren’t. The idea that a few more urgent phone calls or threats would have made a difference doesn’t pass the smell test to me. If we could barely contain the sectarian forces unleashed by the war with 150,000 troops, what hope when we had no troops left at all, or even a couple thousand? The last few years were for the Iraqis to finally make their choice as to what their future could be; and they could not overcome the past, or the entire history of the region. The only real alternative – a US occupation for decades – was simply not there. Maybe at some point Iraqis will be able to overcome their past. I sure hope so. But the only thing I’m sure of is that it won’t happen because America wants it to happen. Au contraire.
And the same sectarian history informs Vice‘s inside look at the IS. What I took from it was the totalizing coherence of the Caliphate’s vision. While the secular dictatorships of Saddam and Assad lie in smoldering ruins, and “democracy” in Iraq is empowering the infidel Shiites, of course a radically idealized theocratic invocation of the ancient Caliphate would have huge appeal (at least for the moment). It has erased the Sykes-Picot borders; it favors the most austere and ascetic form of Sunni Islam, and adds to these elements a kind of preternatural savagery toward its enemies or even its own population. That’s a very potent formula when fused with the Iraqi and Syrian Sunni populations seeking to defend themselves against Shiite regimes. So that’s what we have here – a well-trained, lethal, fanatical Sunni-state in embryonic form. And what Vice explains is how that is the real difference. Al Qaeda never ran a state or sought to. But IS is about a new political entity, attracting every frustrated, alienated young Muslim male left behind by the Arab Spring and yearning for meaning and direction.
How solid is this new “state”? Could they, for example, over-run Kurdistan or take Baghdad?
It seems unlikely right now. Their territory is currently very Sunni. And although the Potemkin Iraqi Army – did any of them ever expect really to fight? – is a slough of corruption and incompetence, there are plenty of nasty Shiite militias and dogged pesh merga who would put up one hell of a fight on their own territory. And it’s worth recalling how these extremist movements have crested and crashed in the past as their savagery and religious purism have alienated the very people they need to control. They could as easily implode at some point as they could explode.
Running an actual state – as opposed to territory being milked to finance and support a sectarian war – has not historically been in the Jihadist skill-set. It requires all sorts of compromises and pragmatism and good government that fanatics tend not to be interested in. All of which leads one to see the prudence of Obama’s very limited pseudo-war. I’d have preferred no intervention at all – because that alone would force the regional powers to reckon with the IS in a way that might actually lead to a resolution. But given that we have intervened, it makes sense for it to be about policing the borders of the IS – and, say, acting to protect Baghdad’s airport – rather than anything more drastic. Fred Kaplan is right to be tart:
Figures released by U.S. Central Command show that the airstrikes over Syria and Iraq, combined, rarely exceed 25 per day. That’s not nothing, but it’s close. A joke recently circulating among Kurds was that they couldn’t tell whether the Americans were not fighting while pretending to fight—or fighting while pretending not to fight.
We would have been better leaving it alone – if only to prevent the huge propaganda and recruiting tool that US intervention has created. (You want Iraq’s and Syria’s Sunnis to resist the fanatics? Don’t make them choose between the IS and the US.) But given Obama’s moment of weakness/panic this summer, what we’ve got is arguably the least worst of most of the alternatives. If the GOP wants to defeat the IS with combat forces, let them make that argument. If they want us to ally with Assad or Iran, ditto. Until then, we are stuck again in a quagmire in which, as yet, only our tippy-toes have gotten swamped. For which small mercies we should remain temporarily thankful.
I don’t feel sad that I am small and insignificant. I think it is amazing that we understand so much about the universe. I’ve felt depressed for a different reason, because according to these modern theories the universe keeps going forever. And even though our local region will kind of succumb to an evil bubble, in different places there will be different Earths and in that scenario, things will repeat themselves. So there will be other Earths that are pretty much exact copies of ours. So of course most of the different civilizations will be nothing like ours, but there will also be ones just like ours.
So what I’m sad about is that we’re not unique in the universe. But small and insignificant … ? We are.
“Saint Francis and the Sow” by Galway Kinnell (1927-2014):
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing
beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
Caitlin Doughty (of “Ask A Mortician” fame) explains why she believes Americans live in a “‘death denial’ culture”:
[W]e’re not engaging with death as a very natural part of life. We’re not treating it like it’s a very obvious endpoint to all of our activities. We’re trying to act like it’s not in many ways, and even more than that, we’re trying to act like the dead body doesn’t exist in culture. We just don’t see it. It’s hidden.
I think there’s a couple reasons why that happened. In the 1930s, there was a rise in both the medical industry and the funeral industry. Both of those industries said, “Hey, we’re the professionals. You shouldn’t die at home and you shouldn’t have the dead body at home. We’re equipped to do both of these things better than you would do yourself.” And the public, because there were growing cities and growing industrialization in all areas, really went along with it. So, we’re at the point now where we completely question whether we’re even able to die at home or have the body at home and take care of it ourselves. We rely on medical and funeral professionals as professionals.
Doughty also makes the unpopular claim that “death [is] a good thing”:
Death might appear to destroy the meaning in our lives, but in fact it is the very source of our creativity. As Kafka said, “The meaning of life is that it ends.” Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create. Philosophers have proclaimed this for thousands of years just as vehemently as we insist upon ignoring it generation after generation. Isaac was getting his PhD, exploring the boundaries of science, making music because of the inspiration death provided. If he lived forever, chances are he would be rendered boring, listless, and unmotivated, robbed of life’s richness by dull routine. The great achievements of humanity were born out of the deadlines imposed by death.
According to Craig L. Blomberg’s Can We Still Believe the Bible?: An Evangelical Engagement with Contemporary Questions, perhaps more than you think. Reviewing the book, Louis Markos highlights areas where Blomberg pushes back against well-known critics of the Bible’s reliability, such as Bart Ehrman, arguing its trustworthiness “does not depend on its living up to logical positivist standards that would have meant nothing to Moses, David, Luke, or Paul”:
In chapter one, Blomberg puts Ehrman’s claim (from Misquoting Jesus) that “there are four hundred thousand textual variants among the ancient New Testament manuscripts” in the proper context. As he demonstrates, there are only two lengthy passages in the entire New Testament (the extended ending to Mark’s Gospel; the woman caught in adultery in John 8) that are sharply contested, and that do not appear in the oldest and best manuscripts. Neither of these passages contains vital theological or historical points that do not appear elsewhere in the Bible, and in all modern translations they are clearly marked as being questionable.
As for Ehrman’s 400,000 variants, Blomberg explains, they are “spread across more than 25,000 manuscripts in Greek or other ancient languages. … This is an average of only 16 variants per manuscript”. And of those variants, only “about a tenth of 1 percent . . . are interesting enough to make their way into footnotes in most English translations”. And the ones that do make it there offer no challenge to the authority of scripture on matters of faith and practice. “It cannot be emphasized strongly enough,” Blomberg concludes, “that no orthodox doctrine or ethical practice of Christianity depends solely on any disputed wording. There are always undisputed passages one can consult that teach the same truths”.
(An image of the Codex Sinaiticus, circa 350 A.D., containing the oldest complete copy of the New Testament, as well as most of the Greek Old Testament, known as the Septuagint, via Wikimedia Commons)
Looking over Arab Barometer data from the past decade, Michael Robbins and Mark Tessler find that throughout the Arab world, “support for democracy remains high but support for political Islam has decreased” while “Islamic democrats – those who support both democracy and political Islam – are becoming scarcer across the region”:
Arab publics continue overwhelmingly to support democracy. In all but one country surveyed, three-quarters or more of respondents in the third wave of surveys (late 2012-2014) agree or strongly agree with the statement “A democratic system may have problems, yet it is better than other political systems.” …
Support for political Islam is substantially lower. In no country do more than half of respondents say religious leaders should have influence over government decisions.
It is often far less support, including just 34 percent in Algeria, 27 percent in Tunisia, 20 percent in Egypt and 9 percent in Lebanon. Moreover, support for political Islam declined over the past decade. Algeria has witnessed the most dramatic decline, with support for political Islam falling from 60 percent in 2006 to just 34 percent in 2013. A similar decline has occurred in Egypt, where 37 percent supported political Islam in June 2011 compared to 18 percent in April 2013, a 19-point decrease. Most other countries witnessed a similar decline, including Palestine (-15 points), Iraq (-11), Lebanon (-9) and Yemen (-7).
In Saudi Arabia, Caryle Murphy profiles the “post-Islamist generation” of young people who are fed up with religious politics:
Young Saudis “are looking for individual freedom and rights, not for religion,” said Mohammed al-Abdulkareem, an assistant professor of Islamic jurisprudence at Al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, a conservative religious university in Riyadh. This “big change” began after the Arab revolutions, he said. “It’s clear to me that from the Arab Spring, people discovered the ideas of human rights and individual freedom and that these ideas were more effective and more successful to get a change in their governments,” he said. “Why would you expect that people would return to religious trends when … these trends and religious institutions didn’t pay attention to human rights and the freedom of the people?” …
The trend is encapsulated in a 27-year-old Saudi woman I met in Riyadh. Raised in a traditionally religious family, she wears the Islamic headscarf and is religiously devout — but she dislikes how her government has used her faith for its own ends. “Islam came to free people. Islam didn’t come to put them in jail,” she said. “And the government uses it to put people in jail and under their control. So they control us by Islam…. That makes a lot of people not even want Islam.”
If we do not experience a deep sense of uncertainty as to how the question we are asking may or may not be answered, then we are not, I would argue, in full exploration of the question. Anderson argues that our questions should occur “within the borders of faith” and that when we question “we do not weigh Christianity in the balances.” These sorts of presuppositions can not only make the questions we ask anemic, they also leave us open to the great danger of assuming that what we believe today as a “border of faith” should actually be a “border of faith.” A growing faith quite likely means that what we think it means to “weigh Christianity in the balances” at one point in our life, will not mean the same thing later. And that’s a good thing.
Anderson and I would agree that good questions have a role in the growth of our faith throughout the life of a believer. We always live with the knowledge that we might one day discover that a belief we have held is wrong, insufficient, or able to be improved upon. But Anderson believes this ongoing pursuit of better questions and answers can continue without doubt. I disagree. Without truly doubting and opening yourself to the possibility that even many of your most deeply held tenets of faith could be wrong or inadequate, questioning will remain a mental exercise that does not reach its potential for personal transformation. Doubt, I would argue, is that state of change that allows for the questions to continue and faith to grow. And as the husks of beliefs that were wrong, too small, or in other ways insufficient fall aside, they join in the process of fertilizing a more perfect faith through their own decomposition.
The Dish 
