Buddhism as philosophy

Let’s say that a religion consists of beliefs–and, often, practices–that many people consider deeply important and that unite them as a community.

By this definition (derived from Durkheim), communism and some forms of patriotism may be religions, but there is no such thing as a solitaire religion. For one thing, most believers value unity and belonging. In the Abrahamic faiths, professions of faith are singular (“I accept Jesus as my personal savior …”), and an adherent could prefer–or be forced–to worship alone. Nevertheless, the basis of an Abrahamic religion is a revelation made to a group of people who formed a community when they accepted the revealed truths. To believe is to join that community. In other traditions, it may make even less sense to be a solo believer.

Finally, many religions claim–to various degrees–to be comprehensive and final. They offer conclusive answers to all the most important questions. This feature helps them to unify their believers and to occupy a major portion of their adherents’ inner lives.

In contrast, let’s call a philosophy a list of beliefs–and the relations among them–that a person arrives at by reflection. One’s reflection need not be rational as opposed to emotional, but it is personal. Everyone can arrive at a different philosophy. If we are wise, we assume that the beliefs on our own list are provisional and incomplete. When we bring our ideas into a public space, we expect disagreement, which may sometimes cause us to adjust our ideas.

By these definitions, a specific belief may play an important role within one or more religions and also one or many philosophies. The belief has the same content but a different function.

Over its long history, Buddhism has been a philosophy for many and a religion for many more. Ideas attributed to the Buddha and his influential followers have served to define and unite believers and have been deeply interwoven with other aspects of the believers’ shared cultures, such as their art, music, and ritual. In that sense, we can talk about Tibetan Buddhism or Buddhist architecture–cultural categories.

Meanwhile, individuals from diverse backgrounds have sometimes assessed ideas from Buddhism and have adopted one or more of them into their own thinking, often in an eclectic fashion, without considering them complete or final, and without necessarily feeling any sense of belonging. The latter is Buddhism as philosophy.

The philosophical approach involves assessing each belief associated with Buddhism, asking whether it coheres with your own experience and your previous reflections and with the other ideas on the list of Buddhist beliefs. This process actually requires a prior step: deciding which ideas are important to Buddhism–a sensitive task, given the variety of views held over more than two millennia of development. The outcome is a list of zero or more ideas that you feel you should provisionally endorse, along with any the other ideas from any other sources that you also hold. For example, I would ask whether each Buddhist idea coheres with major findings of 21st century natural science.

By the way, there is some textual evidence that this is how the Buddha wanted to be received, although I don’t know whether that evidence is historically valid. In any case, I would start the philosophical analysis with the Four Noble Truths, which are fundamental across the whole tradition.

The first is the truth of suffering. It is not wrong to try to phrase this as a proposition, in which case some candidates might be: “Suffering is inevitable,” or “Suffering is universal,” or “Suffering is intrinsic to life.” You can also consider which propositions are incompatible with it, such as “Everything happens for a good reason and works out well in the end,” or “Only people who deserve to suffer ultimately experience suffering.” Buddhism rejects such claims.

But there is a good reason that the noble truths are not usually presented as propositions. To endorse the first noble truth is to feel the significance and ubiquity of suffering: not only one’s own but also everyone else’s. The truth is closely connected to the mental state of compassion. To endorse it is to be compassionate, and vice-versa. The philosophical question, then, is whether such universal compassion is virtuous and valid.

The second noble truth is the truth of the origin of suffering. Spelled out in propositional form, the origin is said to be craving, desire, or attachment (tanha). This is certainly a claim that one can reason about. Does desire inevitably yield suffering? If so, why? Is the reason metaphysical, or is it a feature of human psychology? What kind of emotion (or action?) qualifies as tanha? These are issues within Buddhist philosophy and worthy of inquiry. But, again, the second truth is not typically phrased as a proposition because it is equally important to try it out. Does it seem right that craving, or clinging, or some such emotional state is involved (often or always) in the suffering that one feels and observes?

The third truth is the truth of the cessation of suffering. Removing the cause, which is craving, will remove the suffering itself. This claim is philosophically contestable. Assuming that craving does cause suffering, are we confident that ceasing to crave will remedy the damage already done? Is a life without craving and without suffering a good life? Is it the best life? Again, I think these are questions within Buddhism, not critical of the tradition.

The fourth truth is the path to the cessation of suffering. In medical terms, we have already explored the condition (suffering), the diagnosis (craving), and the cure (ceasing to crave). We need a prescription to accomplish the cure. The prescription is a set of right actions and right thoughts, often spelled out in detail. The specific content is contested and has varied within the tradition, but we can identify some typical elements.

First, right action is moderate. It is the Buddha’s “middle way” between asceticism and self-indulgence. You can’t remove the cause of suffering either by rejecting all pleasurable experiences or by filling your stream of experience with pleasure. You are wiser to put temporary pleasures in their proper place within a life that is ordered and responsible and attainable by actual human beings. By filling your life with this kind of moderation, you occupy time that would otherwise be colonized by immoderate will, which would worsen suffering.

Second, right action helps other sentient beings but without ignoring the actor’s condition. In Owen Flanagan’s phrase, the ideal is “equanimity-in-community.” By being a helpful part of a community while also tending to one’s own mental equilibrium, one fills the time that would otherwise be occupied with indulgence or asceticism, which would worsen suffering. This balance between individual and community complements the moderation of the middle way.

Third, right thinking (and right action) must be consistent with the noble truths. To start with, the first truth implies–or actually is–compassion; therefore, good thought and action must be compassionate. The more mental space we occupy with compassion, the less will fill with craving. The desire that others escape suffering has the unique feature of not causing the desirer to suffer. And if we are truly compassionate, we must act in others’ benefit. Emotion and action come together.

Fourth, right thinking reflects correct metaphysics, which has at least two important features.

The doctrine of no-self holds that there is no autonomous, durable (let alone immortal) self, the kind of thing that might be labeled a “soul” in other traditions. Introspection identifies many specific thoughts and experiences that arrive in a rapid flow. It does not ever identify the self that “has” these experiences, because there is no such thing. Per the second noble truth, the impulse to find a self and to preserve it amid the flux is a form of craving that inevitably yields suffering. Really believing the doctrine of no-self helps to accomplish the cure promised in the fourth truth. Apart from anything else, it makes one much less concerned about oneself, thus leaving more space for compassion.

The doctrine of dependent origination holds that everything happens as the inevitable outcome of the conditions that were in place before it. This is very much like a core metaphysical assumption of modern science. It rejects the notion of a “final” cause (in Aristotle’s sense). Things do not happen because of some independent end or purpose. For instance, I may believe I am raising my hand in order to get attention, but the real cause is the firing of neurons, which happens because of prior neurons’ firing and other physical circumstances. A related doctrine is impermanence: everything inevitably changes.

We should believe in dependent origination and impermanence because they are true and also because they help us on the path from suffering. Believing in final causes–that things happen for good reasons–and in permanent objects of value causes frustration because we constantly observe bad outcomes and change. Instead, we should acknowledge that things just happen. That includes suffering, which arises because of prior conditions, but especially because of prior expressions of craving. Compassionate action interrupts that causal cycle.

What about two famous doctrines that seem much less compatible with modern science and with the moral experiences of modernity: reincarnation and karma?

One way to interpret these ideas would be as background assumptions from the cultural milieu of the Buddha and his South Asian followers. Other Indian traditions also teach karma and reincarnation. In the Mediterranean region, the comparable background assumptions were the survival of the soul after bodily death and the existence of an afterlife. We don’t find it especially interesting when an ancient Mediterranean thinker assumes that souls go to the underworld. We could likewise attribute karma and reincarnation to the cultural milieu and not take these ideas seriously as core ideas of Buddhism–much as we might dismiss the classical Buddhist list of four elements (earth, air, fire, and water), which they shared with Mediterranean peoples. To be a Buddhist today does not imply belief in the four elements, and maybe it doesn’t imply karma and reincarnation.

A different response has the advantage of being more interesting. After all, the popular summaries of both karma and reincarnation contradict major points summarized earlier in this post. If there is no-self, how can the soul transmigrate to a different body after death? And if everything happens through dependent origination, why should good actions always yield benefits to the person who acts well? Why would the universe be set up so nicely?

Perhaps we should revise these doctrines to make them more compatible with the rest of Buddhist thought. In fact, the best any of us can do is to adopt the background material of a culture and revise it in the light of our own best thinking to create a framework that illuminates something about the reality of an existence that is too complex for human beings to grasp in full. In that spirit, let’s reconstruct what a believer in the four noble truths, no-self, and dependent origination would make of reincarnation and karma.

I think reincarnation becomes a doctrine of continuous rebirth. There is no self, just a stream of experiences. In that sense, the self is constantly being reincarnated. Furthermore, most of our experiences are not original to us. We feel things that others have felt before and that still others will feel after we are gone. Even the words we inwardly use to name these experiences belong to languages spoken before and after our time. Thus the components of our experience travel from organism to organism, and the process of rebirth outlasts the natural lives of individuals. This theory is but crudely expressed by the literal idea of reincarnation.

And I think karma gains an ethical gloss. It is not that some cosmic scorekeeper gives us positive points for good behavior and demerit points for bad behavior and calibrates our suffering accordingly (in our current and future lives). We are not literally paying the price for bad actions that we performed in past lives, for there is no self that carries over from yesterday to today, let alone from one death to another. Rather, there is a tendency for craving to cause suffering and for compassionate thoughts and acts to reduce it. Craving is like any other factor in a deterministic world of cause-and-effect: its influence tends to ripple out and affect other people. The best way to block it is to exercise compassion instead. Ideally, that will radiate out positively. In this sense, each of us experiences the total of the good and bad karma of many past lives. There is, however, no one-to-one correspondence between a specific past life and a specific current one.

If these glosses are correct, why are they not communicated more clearly and prominently, at the expense of the literal versions of karma and reincarnation? Here the “three vehicles” idea from Mahayana Buddhism is helpful. We can reduce suffering in several different ways, and any way that works is valuable. If it helps to believe that every bad action accrues to the actor and causes suffering later on–in the next life if not in this life–then that is a welcome result. One who believes this theory will strive to be compassionate and will thus tend to suffer less. However, this theory isn’t Really True. You might instead believe that everyone should be compassionate for its own sake even though the outcomes are uncontrollable and determined. This theory has the advantage of being more philosophically defensible, but it is not very inspiring–except for the wisest among us. So people need a choice of vehicles that they can ride on the path away from suffering.

None of this is meant to be original–it just represents my personal effort to explore some aspects of Buddhism as philosophy. If it has any value, it is as an example of a worthwhile exercise.

It is not final. I assent to several of the Buddhist theories because of my other experiences and my commitment to contemporary science, but experiences and scientific findings change. Also, I did not discuss in any detail my skepticism about some of the theories.

It is not comprehensive. What I have written here says nothing about political institutions or social justice, epistemology, or aesthetics. It is all about ethics and metaphysics (and incomplete on those topics). Of course, thinkers who identify as Buddhists have developed political, epistemological, and aesthetic ideas, but that doesn’t mean that their ideas are implied by the core tenets of Buddhism. If we treat Buddhist ideas as philosophical, we would expect any list to be incomplete and for specific ideas to appear in various philosophical structures that also draw on other sources. Comprehensiveness is impossible.

Finally, the result is not redemptive or salvific. The advice may be good, and you may tend to benefit if you follow it, but you will not be able to honor it completely enough to banish suffering. (It is said that the Buddha experienced headaches even after his enlightenment.) On the other hand, it is possible to envision a person who has followed these principles thoroughly enough to have overcome existential dread. That requires no suspension of the usual physical or metaphysical rules. It is a psychological accomplishment, and it offers as much consolation as one would derive from the news that there was a life after death.

See also: the grammar of the four Noble Truths; freedom of the will or freedom from the will? (comparing Harry Frankfurt and Buddhism); how to think about other people’s interests: Rawls, Buddhism, and empathy; Owen Flanagan, The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized; scholasticism in global context; what secular people can get out of theology; how to think about the self (Buddhist and Kantian perspectives); rebirth without metaphysics; is everyone religious?, three truths and a question about happiness; etc.

legislative capacity is not zero-sum

One way to think about the power of any legislature is the decisions it can make–for instance, to raise or lower taxes or to ban or legalize various things. Its power is almost always limited by other institutions, such as an executive or courts. And its power is finite, which means that the distribution of power within the body is zero-sum. If one party bloc makes a decision, the other parties do not. If the speaker, prime minister, or legislative leader gains influence, the rank-and-file loses power. If the committees are powerful, the whole body is weaker.

Given this model, it is puzzling why power sometimes centralizes within a legislature (as it has in the Massachusetts State House). Since each member has an equal vote, why would most members vote for leaders and rules that empower the leaders as opposed to the rank-and-file?

Perhaps the members of a large body face a classic coordination problem: they don’t really like the distribution of power but cannot organize themselves to challenge it. Perhaps they would rather have a strong leader than be walked over by the executive branch. Perhaps the party leadership obtains loyalty by influencing election outcomes. Or perhaps the average member is simply content without a lot of influence. There could be a vicious cycle, in which the kind of person who wants to influence legislation gets frustrated and leaves, and the remainder vote to empower the leadership.

The other way to think about this issue is in terms of capacity rather than power. A legislature does many things. It collects input from stakeholders, investigates the other branches of government and public problems, considers policy proposals, assimilates research, develops proposals, builds consensus within and beyond the body, amends and refines bills, and (finally) makes decisions by voting.

It can do more or less of this. At a minimum, it may barely scrape by, passing the laws that are constitutionally required, such as a budget (or may even fail to accomplish that). At the maximum, it can operate like the US Congress in 1965, which wrote, refined, and passed landmark bills to create Medicare and Medicaid (plus the NEH and NEA), enfranchise people of color, involve the federal government in K-12 and higher education, and open the US to mass immigration. Whether you like those laws or not, they represented much more lawmaking than usual. In fact, the year 1965 perhaps saw more federal lawmaking than has occurred during my entire lifetime, and I was born in 1967.

Power (in the sense of the first paragraph) is zero-sum. But capacity is not. Just because one group of legislators is working away on school reform does not mean that a different committee can’t be holding hearings on taxes.

Total legislative capacity can be expanded. That requires attracting talented and dedicated legislators. It may require a favorable climate beyond the legislature. It also requires nuts-and-bolts support. For example, legislators have more capacity if they have more staff, both in their own offices and shared by the body. In the Massachusetts legislature, the typical House member has one employee, which is not enough to do much legislative business.

Less capacity in the legislature can mean more power for the other branches, particularly the executive. That is a finding of Bolton & Thrower, “Legislative Capacity and Executive Unilateralism,” American Journal of Political Science, 60(3), (2016), pp. 649-663. However, it is also possible for an entire government to lose capacity.

Newt Gingrich cut congressional staff in Washington, especially the staff of the nonpartisan legislative-branch bureaus, which employ fewer than one third as many people as they did before 1990. This made sense for what he wanted to accomplish. If total capacity is smaller, it is easier for the leadership to control the body. (In that way, zero-sum power is related to capacity.) Besides, Gingrich’s legislative agenda was very simple–tax cuts, above all–and it didn’t require nearly as much capacity as center-left legislation would. Still, the result was a national legislature that cannot do much legislating of any kind.

There is an interesting wrinkle in the two graphs below, taken from Bolton & Thrower 2016. Congress was at its most active and ambitious while its staffing was rapidly rising, but not yet at its peak. The peak lagged a decade or so behind. That fits my general impression that the modern welfare state proved challenging to manage and sometimes overburdened our institutions–meaning all three branches of the federal government, states and localities, interest groups, and the press. After Congress enacted the major elements of the Great Society, it turned to managing those programs and gave that task serious attention for about fifteen years. Then conservatives tried to cut the programs (consistent with their principles and their mandate) but also cut the capacity to manage them without actually abolishing them. The result has been successively worse implementation.

From Bolton, A., & Thrower, S. (2016). Legislative Capacity and Executive Unilateralism. American Journal of Political Science, 60(3), 649-663.

Today’s Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress recognizes the problem. They call for increasing the capacity of Congress, “increas[ing] the funds allocated to each Member office for staff,” raising staff pay, and hiring “bipartisan [committee[ staff approved by both the Chair and Ranking Member to promote strong institutional knowledge [and] evidence-based policy making.”

This is an important agenda, and we need similar changes in Massachusetts.

See also: an agenda for political reform in Massachusetts; a different explanation of dispiriting political news coverage and debate; civic renewal in a state legislature; etc.

“you should be the pupil of everyone all the time”

One should accept the advice of those who are able to direct others, who offer unsolicited aid. One should be the pupil of everyone all the time.

– Shantideva, The Bodhicaryavatara 5:74, translated by Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton (ca. 700 CE)

The fifth book of this major work is devoted to “The Guarding of Awareness.” Here Shantideva offers many precepts, of which this is just one. For instance, in the previous verse, he recommends moving quietly: like a crane, a cat, or a thief.

No one could fully follow all these instructions all the time. That is a problem of which Shantideva is fully aware. Chapter 4, “Vigilance Regarding the Awakening Mind,” addresses the inevitable backsliding that comes after an oath to attain Buddhahood. “Swinging back and forth like this in a cyclic existence, now under the sway of errors, now under the sway of the Awakening Mind, it takes a long time to gain ground” (4:11). The best we can do is try. “If I make no effort today I shall sink to lower and lower levels (4:12).

Therefore, the question is not whether it is possible to be the pupil of everyone all the time (it is not), but whether that is a valid aspiration. It isn’t obviously so. After all, many people communicate false and even wicked ideas. Why listen to them? We are also very repetitious. I offer virtually nothing that hasn’t already been said better by others. Why should everyone be my pupil; and I, theirs? And if we are always listening to everyone, when are we acting to improve the world?

The first quoted sentence recommends taking advice from “those who are able to direct others”–presumably those who have something valuable to offer. It doesn’t imply the striking second sentence, which tells us always to be learning from everyone. Why?

Maybe it is hyperbole: an exaggerated reminder to be more open to other people (and other animals) than we would otherwise tend to be, but not a rule that the wise would apply literally.

Or maybe it connects to Shantideva’s core recommendation: compassion for all. The argument would go: Each of us knows the most about our own situation and context. We each have a world of our own, which is a portion of the whole world viewed from our particular spot. The best life is a life of compassion for all those individuals. To be compassionate toward them requires understanding their situation as much as possible. And that implies being their pupil, all of the time.

Is this right? How does it relate to the virtue of justice? And what should we think about scientific methods of discernment? For instance, is surveying a representative sample of Americans a way of being a pupil of them all? If not, why not?

See also: how to think about other people’s interests: Rawls, Buddhism, and empathy; “Empathy” is a new word. Do we need it?; Empathy and Justice; etc.

how people estimate their own life expectancies

How long people expect to live could be important for at least two reasons.

First, individuals may know information about their own circumstances that affect their predictions. Maybe they know that they are sick or in frequent danger from gun violence. In that case, their prediction of their own life-expectancy might be a proxy for their social circumstances.

Second, their prediction may change some of their own cost/benefit calculations. There is, for example, no economic or other extrinsic reason to pursue education if you fear that your life is nearly over. Then again, you might procrastinate on getting more education if you think you have a very long time left to live.

Therefore I am interested in who makes optimistic or pessimistic estimates of their own life-expectancies. Of course, younger people will expect to live for more years, on average, than older people, and that doesn’t reflect optimism. So I adjusted for age by looking at the difference between how long people expect to live and how long the Social Security Administration (SSA) predicts that someone of their age and gender will live. If people give a higher number than the SSA, they are optimistic; a lower number reflects pessimism. Pessimism may be entirely warranted and reasonable, but it could still have negative effects on some important behaviors.

Data: Tufts Equity Research Group. Analysis: Peter Levine

The scatterplot shows that individuals’ predictions correlate with what the SSA would say, but there is a lot of variation. One young dude expects to live for another 110 years, whereas the SSA would give him 58 years. Several people expect to die very soon. What accounts for these differences?

Using the Tufts equity research survey, I looked first at the factors that are incorporated in prominent actuarial models–the things that we’re told actually lengthen or shorten our lives. If you go to a “longevity calculator” like this one, it will ask you to enter your own year of birth, gender, race, education level, body mass index, income, whether you are retired, and your habits of exercise, smoking, and drinking alcohol. It will tell you how many years you probably have left to live, based on your answers and a significant body of research.

Some of those factors affect optimism, but some do not. Reporting results from a regression model that are significant at p<.05:

  • Younger people are more optimistic, meaning not that they expect to live more years than older people but that their predictions for their lives are higher in comparison to the SSA’s predictions for them.
  • White people are more optimistic than people of color, and they have a basis for that.
  • Higher body mass index (BMI) correlates with pessimism.
  • Regular vigorous exercise predicts more optimism.
  • Education, gender, marital status, income, employment status, and drinking and smoking are not related to optimism, even though they are significant predictors of life expectancy in actuarial models.

I also went looking for measures that might predict optimism even though they are not in the actuarial models that I see online. Some of them are quite significant. When added to a regression model with the variables listed above …

  • Frequency of attending religious services predicts optimism.
  • People with better overall health (per their self-report) are much more optimistic.
  • Stress about climate change comes close to predicting pessimism (p=.054).
  • Whether you own a gun and whether you planned to vote for Trump or Biden are not related to optimism.

To some extent, people seem to be making accurate predictions based on life circumstances. For instance, they are right to worry about high BMIs. They seem to be missing some important factors, such as smoking and drinking. The correlation with religious participation could reflect the beneficial results of participating in communities, or perhaps religion makes one optimistic about one’s own life, or perhaps people who think they have a long time to live are motivated to attend services.

See also: how predictable is the rest of your life?; the aspiration curve from youth to old age

how predictable is the rest of your life?

Last year, I had a chance to add this question to the Tufts national survey of equity:

Imagine that someone summarized your life, long after your lifetime. To what extent do you already know what that summary would say?

I was interested in how people’s life circumstances might lead them to answer that question differently, and what different answers might mean. For instance, you might be a successful young student for whom the unpredictability of the rest of your life is a sign of broad options and unlimited possibility. You might hate your current situation and feel depressed because you don’t believe it will ever change. You might feel precarious, so that your uncertainty about the remainder of your life is mostly stressful.

I hope to investigate how various subgroups answer the question. In the meantime, I ran a very simple regression to try to predict answers based on people’s demographics (age, race, gender), their perception of their own economic trajectory (Are you better of than your parents, will you be better off next year, and will your children be better of than you?), their sense of civic or political efficacy (Can you make a change in your community by working with others?), a measure of stability at work (How far in advance do you know how many hours you will be working per day?), and a measure of stress about climate change (to see whether worries about the climate were making some people uncertain about their lives).

The results are below. (A positive coefficient indicates less certainty.) I’ll summarize the results that are statistically significant (p<.005):

  • Certainty about the story of one’s whole life rises with age, but the coefficient is small. People tend to get just a tiny bit more certain with each passing year. I am more interested in the small relationship than its statistical significance.
  • Certainty rises with more education. At least if you put the whole sample together, it seems that people who have more education don’t feel greater uncertainty because their options are expanded. Rather, they feel more certain, perhaps because they are more secure or feel more control over their lives.
  • Certainty falls with civic efficacy. Apparently, if you think you can make a difference in the world around you, you are less confident that you know the whole story of your life. I hope this is because you believe that unexpected good options might open up.
  • Certainty is lower for people who see their own families on a positive economic trajectory. Maybe perceiving that you are getting wealthier makes you hope for unexpected futures. I find it interesting that economic optimism and education have the opposite relationship to this outcome.
  • The demographic measures, stability at work, and climate stress are not related to this outcome.

As always, I would welcome any thoughts about these very preliminary findings.

See also: youth, midlife & old-age as states of mind; Kieran Setiya on midlife: reviving philosophy as a way of life; to what extent do you already know the story of your life?; the aspiration curve from youth to old age

Philippe Aigrain (1949-2021): An Appreciation

Nearly twenty years ago, just after I published Silent Theft, my first book about the commons, I was mingling with strangers at a conference reception at Georgetown University. The World Wide Web and open source software were still in their infancy, and few people in mainstream circles gave much thought to the implications of copyright law on human freedom and creativity. Suddenly a French fellow appeared out of nowhere and introduced himself to me, saying that he wanted to talk about the commons.

Philippe Aigrain, 1949-2021

And that is how Philippe Aigrain soon became a friend and my first European colleague in studying the commons, circa 2003. With great sadness, I learned last week that Philippe died on July 11 following a hiking accident in the French Pyrénées, at age 72. I share the heartbreak expressed by Francophone commoners and beyond at this crushing news.

Philippe was a computer scientist and activist who led many early fights against software patents, especially as director of the Software Freedom Law Center. He was also a cofounder of the French advocacy group La Quadrature du Net in 2008, which fights for basic human rights on digital networks, free software, and the commons.

In 2005, Philippe published a lengthy essay, Cause Commune, that proposed that we begin thinking about information commons as an alternative to intellectual property, which has so many anti-social, anti-competitive, and politically restrictive effects.The piece was one of the earliest, most thoughtful pieces in any language to develop the idea of the commons with respect to knowledge. He later published Sharing: Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age (Amsterdam University Press, 2012), which gave a richer development to the whole idea of digital knowledge and culture commons.

What I found so memorable about Philippe was his astute political insight, quiet courage, and his deep well of gracious humanity. As his colleagues at La Quadrature du Net wrote in its appreciation of him:

Photo of flowers posted on 'Atelier de Bricolage Litteraire,' July 10, 2021

We admired [Philippe’s] capacity for indignation, the thoroughness and depth of his analyses, the way he could set aside certain activist reactions to size up a situation in all its complexity. When there was a risk of drowning in the details of an issue, he would encourage us to step back and return to the fundamental political issues at stake….Philippe taught us that it is possible to combine a lucid view of the world and a high level of political commitment, while never forsaking either care for others or for oneself, nor indeed joy and poetry.

Philippe’s colleague Jérémie Zimmermann admired him as “a rare being, with a humility that was matched only by the strength and freedom of his thought.”

When I visited Paris with my family in 2005, Philippe and his wife Mirielle went out of their way to invite us to their apartment for a fantastic dinner. We talked long into the evening, and I recalled how his generosity of spirit turned strangers into friends and made the world a more welcoming place.

Much of Philippe’s attention in recent years was devoted to the plight of refugees. He also directed the publishing house PublieNet, and published his first novel Sœur(s) [Sisters], which deals with the issue of surveillance. Some of Philippe’s poems and other writings can be found at Atelier de Bricolage Littéraire. Heartfelt condolences to Mirielle and the Aigrain family.

Philippe Aigrain (1949-2021): An Appreciation

Nearly twenty years ago, just after I published Silent Theft, my first book about the commons, I was mingling with strangers at a conference reception at Georgetown University. The World Wide Web and open source software were still in their infancy, and few people in mainstream circles gave much thought to the implications of copyright law on human freedom and creativity. Suddenly a French fellow appeared out of nowhere and introduced himself to me, saying that he wanted to talk about the commons.

Philippe Aigrain, 1949-2021

And that is how Philippe Aigrain soon became a friend and my first European colleague in studying the commons, circa 2003. With great sadness, I learned last week that Philippe died on July 11 following a hiking accident in the French Pyrénées, at age 72. I share the heartbreak expressed by Francophone commoners and beyond at this crushing news.

Philippe was a computer scientist and activist who led many early fights against software patents, especially as director of the Software Freedom Law Center. He was also a cofounder of the French advocacy group La Quadrature du Net in 2008, which fights for basic human rights on digital networks, free software, and the commons.

In 2005, Philippe published a lengthy essay, Cause Commune, that proposed that we begin thinking about information commons as an alternative to intellectual property, which has so many anti-social, anti-competitive, and politically restrictive effects.The piece was one of the earliest, most thoughtful pieces in any language to develop the idea of the commons with respect to knowledge. He later published Sharing: Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age (Amsterdam University Press, 2012), which gave a richer development to the whole idea of digital knowledge and culture commons.

What I found so memorable about Philippe was his astute political insight, quiet courage, and his deep well of gracious humanity. As his colleagues at La Quadrature du Net wrote in its appreciation of him:

Photo of flowers posted on 'Atelier de Bricolage Litteraire,' July 10, 2021

We admired [Philippe’s] capacity for indignation, the thoroughness and depth of his analyses, the way he could set aside certain activist reactions to size up a situation in all its complexity. When there was a risk of drowning in the details of an issue, he would encourage us to step back and return to the fundamental political issues at stake….Philippe taught us that it is possible to combine a lucid view of the world and a high level of political commitment, while never forsaking either care for others or for oneself, nor indeed joy and poetry.

Philippe’s colleague Jérémie Zimmermann admired him as “a rare being, with a humility that was matched only by the strength and freedom of his thought.”

When I visited Paris with my family in 2005, Philippe and his wife Mirielle went out of their way to invite us to their apartment for a fantastic dinner. We talked long into the evening, and I recalled how his generosity of spirit turned strangers into friends and made the world a more welcoming place.

Much of Philippe’s attention in recent years was devoted to the plight of refugees. He also directed the publishing house PublieNet, and published his first novel Sœur(s) [Sisters], which deals with the issue of surveillance. Some of Philippe’s poems and other writings can be found at Atelier de Bricolage Littéraire. Heartfelt condolences to Mirielle and the Aigrain family.

scholasticism in global context

In The Sound of Two Hands Clapping, Georges B.J. Dreyfus describes Tibetan monasteries as homes for “scholasticism,” using a word originally coined to describe a form of Catholic thought and practice that was most influential in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries–later to be mocked and repudiated by both Protestants and Catholic Humanists. As Dreyfus notes, this word has also been used to describe specific traditions in Islam, and more recently in Hinduism and Buddhism. In his book, he explores strong parallels in Judaism.

It could be that scholasticism is an option within any heavily organized and sustained tradition of thought, whether we classify it as a religion or as something else.

One core component is a belief in argument–not just discussion and disagreement, but contentious, often competitive pro/con debate. Debates in Tibetan monasteries are high-pressure, competitive affairs conducted before active audiences. The same was true in medieval universities, where students paid the lecturers individually and enjoyed competitive showdowns. King and Arling write that Abelard’s “quick wit, sharp tongue, perfect memory and boundless arrogance made him unbeatable in debate—he was said by supporter and detractor alike never to have lost an argument.” Dreyfus recalls the Jewish practice of havruta, learning in pairs, and emphasizes that these pairs debate each other.

In scholastic traditions, debate is not seen as a temporary necessity while we sort out important topics once and for all. Instead, it is a form of religious practice, comparable to meditation or ritual and something like an end in itself.

Martin Luther hated it for just that reason. Luther was a formidable debater, but he was trying to defeat heresy. He would have been deeply disappointed to learn that people are still debating theology centuries later. In contrast, I think that Tibetan monks work to keep the debate going. They see it as a good way of life.

Debating what is actually said in the most revered texts of any tradition is risky. While arguing about such texts, it is hard to avoid arguing with them. Therefore, an interesting pattern in scholasticism is a tendency to argue about the previous commentators. According to Dreyfus, “Tibetans emphasize less the inspirational words of the founder (the sutras) and more the study of their content as summarized by the great Indian treatises.” In theory, “the authority of the Indian commentaries is extremely important; practically, they are used in Tibetan education relatively rarely by teachers and students.” Instead, Tibetan monks memorize and debate Tibetan commentaries on the Indian summaries of the sutras that are attributed to the Buddha. My sense is that Catholic commentaries on Aristotle, Jewish Talmudic study, and Islamic jurisprudence have a similar flavor.

Again, this style drove Luther crazy. The truth was in the original Word of God (sola scriptura) not in pedantic commentaries. Erasmus opposed scholasticism for a different but compatible reason. For him, the ancient texts–including but not limited to the Bible–made better literature than the ponderous tomes of the scholastics. The classics had style and form. However, if you want to keep on debating forever, then it makes sense to focus on the commentaries and let them accumulate, layer upon layer.

Another common feature is a focus on law–not necessarily in the literal sense of state-enforced rules and punishments, but at least the question of what counts as the right action in all kinds of circumstances; call it casuistry, jurisprudence, or applied ethics. I’m guessing this is a fruitful focus because we can invent new ethical questions endlessly. Besides, if the real purpose of the debate is self-improvement, then good behavior makes an ideal topic.

Social stratification often emerges in these traditions, to the point where the scholastic authorities can be quasi-hereditary. Yet the traditions offer stories about talented teachers who came up from nowhere. That is the point of the opening story of the Platform Sutra, when an illiterate monk grasps the point that the educated ones have missed and becomes a great authority. (This is my example, not Dreyfus’, and it might not be germane.) Jean Gerson, who became the most senior scholar in Paris, was born as one of twelve children of pious peasants. Of course, meritocratic anecdotes serve as great justifications for hierarchical systems.

I share this generic definition of scholasticism without a value-judgment. I am not sure how much I admire these traditions or resonate to them. Presumably, they are best assessed as parts of much larger social orders that offer other options as well. In any case, it seems valuable to recognize a form of life that recurs so widely.

See also: Foucault’s spiritual exercises; does focusing philosophy on how to live broaden or narrow it?; Hannah Arendt and philosophy as a way of life; avoiding the labels of East and West; Owen Flanagan, The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized; is everyone religious?; etc.

Civics in Florida: The Legacy of the Justice Sandra Day O’Connor Civic Education Act

The Justice Sandra Day O’Connor Civic Education Act

Any discussion of civics in Florida, and its success, begins with the Justice Sandra Day O’Connor Civic Education Act. Passed in 2010, this Act required the creation and implementation of a civics course in middle school. This course includes an end-of-course exam that counts as 30% of a student’s final grade, as well as for school grade and teacher evaluation. In addition, in order to go on to high school, students MUST pass civics. So since at least 2013, as civics was implemented, Florida has had a strong civic education initiative. Every middle school student in the state of Florida MUST pass civics.

What Is Required? 

The middle school civics course in Florida contains 40 benchmarks, 35 of which are directly assessed on the End of Course Assessment. The standards are traditionally organized into 4 reporting categories:

  • Origins and Purposes of Law and Government
  • Roles, Rights, and Responsibilities of Citizens
  • Government Policies and Political Processes
  • Organization and Function of Government

You can further break these down into 9 topic areas that cover a wide variety of civics content and benchmarks:
360 areas

So, what is covered in these benchmarks? Essentially, the benchmarks address the comprehensive knowledge that students need to be engaged with civic life in the United States, from the workings of the US Constitution to the role of political parties in the United States and everything in between! You can review each of the benchmarks below, organized by reporting category. Click on the link to go to Florida Joint Center for Citizenship resources for each one! It should be noted that the state has adopted new benchmarks as of July 14th, effective for 2023-2024. But this is what they are right now.

Origins and Purposes of Law and Government

Reporting Category One

Benchmark ResourcesDescription
SS.7.C.1.1Recognize how Enlightenment ideas including Montesquieu’s view of separation of power and John Locke’s theories related to natural law and how Locke’s social contract influenced the Founding Fathers.
SS.7.C.1.2Trace the impact that the Magna Carta, English Bill of Rights, Mayflower Compact, and Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” had on colonists’ views of government.
SS.7.C.1.3Describe how English policies and responses to colonial concerns led to the writing of the Declaration of Independence.
SS.7.C.1.4Analyze the ideas (natural rights, role of the government) and complaints set forth in the Declaration of Independence.
SS.7.C.1.5Identify how the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation led to the writing of the Constitution.
SS.7.C.1.6Interpret the intentions of the Preamble of the Constitution.
SS.7.C.1.7Describe how the Constitution limits the powers of government through separation of powers and checks and balances.
SS.7.C.1.8Explain the viewpoints of the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists regarding the ratification of the Constitution and inclusion of a bill of rights.
SS.7.C.1.9Define the rule of law and recognize its influence on the development of the American legal, political, and governmental systems.
SS.7.C.3.10Identify sources and types (civil, criminal, constitutional, military) of law.

Roles, Rights, and Responsibilities of Citizens

Reporting Category Two

Benchmark ResourcesDescription
SS.7.C.2.1Define the term “citizen,” and identify legal means of becoming a United States citizen.
SS.7.C.2.2Evaluate the obligations citizens have to obey laws, pay taxes, defend the nation, and serve on juries.
Also Assesses: SS.7.C.2.3—Experience the responsibilities of citizens at the local, state, or federal levels.
Also Assesses: SS.7.C.2.14—Conduct a service project to further the public good.
SS.7.C.2.4Evaluate rights contained in the Bill of Rights and other amendments to the Constitution.
SS.7.C.2.5Distinguish how the Constitution safeguards and limits individual rights.
SS.7.C.3.6Evaluate Constitutional rights and their impact on individuals and society.
SS.7.C.3.7Analyze the impact of the 13th, 14th, 15th, 19th, 24th, and 26th amendments on participation of minority groups in the American political process.
SS.7.C.3.12Analyze the significance and outcomes of landmark Supreme Court cases including, but not limited to, Marbury v. Madison, Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education, Gideon v. Wainwright, Miranda v. Arizona, in re Gault, Tinker v. Des Moines, Hazelwood v. Kuhlmier, United States v. Nixon, and Bush v. Gore.

Government Policies and Political Processes

Reporting Category Three

Benchmark ResourcesDescription
SS.7.C.2.8Identify America’s current political parties, and illustrate their ideas about government.
SS.7.C.2.9Evaluate candidates for political office by analyzing their qualifications, experience, issue-based platforms, debates, and political ads.
Also Assesses: SS.7.C.2.7—Conduct a mock election to demonstrate the voting process and its impact on a school, community, or local level.
SS.7.C.2.10Examine the impact of media, individuals, and interest groups on monitoring and influencing government.
SS.7.C.2.11Analyze media and political communications (bias, symbolism, propaganda).
SS.7.C.2.12Develop a plan to resolve a state or local problem by researching public policy alternatives, identifying appropriate government agencies to address the issue, and determining a course of action.
SS.7.C.2.13Examine multiple perspectives on public and current issues.
SS.7.C.4.1Differentiate concepts related to United States domestic and foreign policy.
SS.7.C.4.2Recognize government and citizen participation in international organizations.
SS.7.C.4.3Describe examples of how the United States has dealt with international conflicts.

Organization and Function of Government

Reporting Category Four

Benchmark ResourcesDescription
SS.7.C.3.1Compare different forms of government (direct democracy, representative democracy, socialism, communism, monarchy, oligarchy, autocracy).
SS.7.C.3.2Compare parliamentary, federal, confederal, and unitary systems of government.
SS.7.C.3.3Illustrate the structure and function (three branches of government established in Articles I, II, and III with corresponding powers) of government in the United States as established in the Constitution.
SS.7.C.3.4Identify the relationship and division of powers between the federal government and state governments.
SS.7.C.3.5Explain the Constitutional amendment process.
SS.7.C.3.8Analyze the structure, functions, and processes of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches.
Also Assesses: SS.7.C.3.9—Illustrate the law making process at the local, state, and federal levels.
SS.7.C.3.11Diagram the levels, functions, and powers of courts at the state and federal levels.
Also Assesses: SS. 7.C.2.6—Simulate the trial process and the role of juries in the administration of justice.
SS.7.C.3.13Compare the constitutions of the United States and Florida.
SS.7.C.3.14Differentiate between local, state, and federal governments’ obligations and services.
EOC TIS

Each benchmark is further broken down into individual benchmark clarifications that tell stakeholders what they are expected to know. You can get a copy of these clarifications here, provided in the Test Item Specifications.

What Does the Data Say? 

Good news on the data front when it comes to civics! As of the 2019 Civics EOCA administration, 71% of all students that took the exam scored a 3, 4, or 5. What this means is that 71% of all students passed the Civics End Of Course Assessment. This is 10 percentage points higher than the initial administration from 2014! As the charts below (from the Florida Department of Education) indicate, we are also seeing some positive growth among minority students as well. This is a trend that we hope to see continue, as FJCC and other organizations continue to work hard to provide resources and support for teachers and students.

achlevel
acghlevl2
ach3.JPG
achg4.JPG

So What Needs to Improve? 

Without a doubt, Florida has seen significant positive results from the implementation of civic education at the middle school level. At this point, as a state, we are doing well with the knowledge aspect. But there is certainly room for improvement. At FJCC, we have been working to build a collection of resources and supports that address the skills and dispositions that can be used in conjunction with the knowledge that students have gained. You know how government works, and the role the Constitution plays in your life. So what can you do with that knowledge? We are working with organizations like the Civics Renewal Network, the Boys and Girls Clubs of Central Florida, the Constitutional Rights Foundation, and others to improve opportunities for engagement.

We also need to do far more in elementary schools. That, however, is a bit of a sticky wicket, as social studies as a whole has struggled for attention in elementary schools; the pressure of preparing students for math, ELA, and science assessments has often crowded out untested content areas like social studies, both here and Florida and nationally.

Elem Social Studies CCSSO

That beings said, there ARE some good resources out there, like FJCC’s own Civics in a Snap. Civics in a Snap is a collection of K-5 lessons around civics content and questions that can be done in an elementary class in about 15 to 20 minutes. Take a look!

3.c.2.1

We are also thinking about ways in which we can do more at the high school level to engage students in experiential learning around civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions.

pia1.jpg

Moving Forward

We at the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship at the Lou Frey Institute at the University of Central Florida applaud the governor’s call for a prioritization of civic education. We hope that it includes an in depth consideration of ways in which we get students to engage in civic life at all levels, and a renewed focus on getting social studies back into the elementary schools. And the continued leadership that Florida has shown in quality civics teaching and learning!

And be sure to check out Civics360 to find videos and readings related to the civics content that kids here in Florida need to learn! It’s all free! And we will update these resources to align with the new benchmarks.

“Just teach the facts”

Apparently, at public meetings about social studies curricula, some people are saying: “Just teach facts.” Insofar as this call is coming from people incensed about Critical Race Theory in our k-12 schools, the irony is hard to ignore. CRT is very rarely, if ever, taught, and some of the ideas being attributed to it are factual. Yet I think there is also something else going on. Across many issues and in many political subcultures, it’s common to demand facts instead of opinions, as if the facts are all on our side and the other side is the opinionated one. I have encountered liberals who make versions of this argument, whether about COVID-19 or about history and politics.

In their 2002 book Stealth Democracy, John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse argue that about 70% of Americans are drawn to the idea that gives their book its title. These people basically see disagreement as a sign of corruption. It should not be necessary to disagree about matters of political or moral importance. People who express contrasting opinions must have bad motives or be sadly misguided. Since disagreement is rife, it would be “better if decisions were left up to nonelected, independent experts.”

In a great 2010 paper, Michael Neblo, Kevin Esterling, Ryan Kennedy, David Lazer, and Anand Sokhey showed that fewer people probably held the stealth democracy position than Hibbing and Theiss-Morse had found, and Americans were more tolerant of disagreement. However, Neblo and colleagues didn’t find zero support for stealth democracy, and I think it pops up fairly often.

It may reflect frustration about opinions that one strongly dislikes: Why can’t those misguided people just acknowledge the facts? But it may also reflect a deeper problem.

In an era when science (as popularly defined) has enormous prestige and purports to distinguish facts sharply from values, people don’t know what to make of value-laden disagreements. Justin McBrayer found this sign hanging in his son’s second-grade classroom:

Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.

Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes.

McBrayer attributes this distinction to the Common Core. I think the text of the Common Core is actually a bit subtler, and the sign reflects a widespread view. In any case, the distinction is untenable.

First of all, we must select which facts to investigate. We could teach George Washington’s achievements or slavery in colonial America–or neither, or both–but the facts themselves can’t tell us which of those things to study.

Second, the information we possess always reflects other people’s interests and concerns. American historians, for example, study marginalized and oppressed people more than they did a half century ago. This shift reflects ethical principles. Historians do not, and cannot, pursue all facts indiscriminately. You might dispute their emphasis, but then you’re arguing for different values, not rejecting their facts.

Third, it is very hard to identify a fact that is free of value-judgments or a value-judgment that does not encompass empirical beliefs about the way the world works.

Fourth, many of the most important facts about history are the opinions people held. Lincoln’s response to secession was his opinion, but attributing a position to him is either correct or incorrect. You cannot teach history without teaching–and spending a lot of your time teaching–opinions.

Perhaps most importantly, not all values are just opinions that people happen to hold. Valuing chocolate ice cream over vanilla ice cream is subjective, in this sense. Believing that genocide is evil is not. It isn’t a fact “that can be tested or proven,” but it also isn’t just something I happen to feel. It is something we are all obliged to feel.

Education inevitably involves choices about what to teach and how to talk about and interpret information. It inevitably conveys values and causes students to make judgments–whether as intended or in reaction to what the school wants them to think. Education is better when it helps students to develop political and intellectual virtues. But adults disagree about virtues, and our disagreements reflect our freedom, our diversity, and our nature as finite, embodied, fallible creatures. Therefore, disagreement about what and how to teach is inevitable, permanent, and a sign that free people care about the future. “Just teach the facts” is a call to stop this debate, when what we need is more and better.

See also: first year college students and moral relativism;  science, democracy, and civic lifeis science republican (with a little r)?some thoughts on natural lawis all truth scientific truth?; etc.