The Left Can Meme - At Last

For years, the trope on social media has been "the left can't meme." The right, especially the alt-right and the 4-chan right, have been a relentless band of merry pranksters on the internet for ten years or more, mercilessly lampooning every aspect of the left. Meanwhile, the left, for its part, has been unable to counter the attacks because the left's memes are lame. 

The typical right-leaning meme shows some sort of pop culture artifact which, when combined with a real and actual position held by left-leaning people, combines to make a funny joke that is universally understood. The typical left-leaning meme, by contrast, usually shows a picture of someone who is angry, accompanied by some words about how dumb or infuriating the right is. It's not clear that the latter example really is a joke. It's just a photo attached to a short rant. It's lame. That's why the left can't meme.

Or, at least, that's why I thought the left couldn't meme. I thought the people creating these memes basically had such bad senses of humor that they couldn't make an effective joke at the right's expense. And perhaps that is still true of many left-leaning memers. 

In the last 48 hours, however, the left's ability to meme has blossomed in the wake of the weird thing that happened at the Capitol building. For the first time in my life, I'm seeing some genuinely funny left-leaning memes lampooning the right quite effectively. 

What changed? Here's a theory:

For decades, the left have been staging protests and attendant photo ops, and these events have been full of, well, clowns. Leftist protests for many, many years have been filled with fringe characters sporting weird clothes, dreadlocks, piercings, and costumes. The events have been attended by people doing drugs and playing with juggling sticks. It's been close to a literal circus every time the left has shown up to protest something. Any photo from such an event is a meme in the making. It's impossible to take such people seriously because it is almost as if they don't take themselves seriously. 

Right-leaning protests, by contrast, have been full of people wearing either leather or blue jeans and sporting American flags, but beyond that, they look pretty much like the people you see at the local gas station. We might criticize their ideas, their grammar, or etc., but a photograph of these people hasn't in the past been an easy laugh. 

So, there has always been that difference between the left and the right. 

But not anymore. 

When Trump's clown circus stormed the capitol building, they looked every bit as ridiculous as the left has looked whenever they showed up to protest. Wearing face paint and buffalo skins, grinning like fools, and prancing around like circus performers, these rightist protestors made absolute idiots of themselves, and everybody knows it. 

That fact is now well-established in leftist memes. The left can finally use actual photos of actual rightist idiots to refer to commonly understood cultural events, and the left can give it to the right good and hard. Best of all, the right brought all this upon themselves, and they deserve it.

Truthfully, I don't know what the future holds for conservatism or Republicanism in America. I honestly don't see how the Republicans can recover from such a total self-destruction. What serious person is going to continue to stand behind such a clown show? 

Virtue Signals

Here's another post I've been trying to write for a long time. This one's about letting other people know that you're a good person.

Ordinarily, we might call this kind of behavior "virtue signaling," but that, of course, is a loaded term these days. Nonetheless, there are ways that all of us try to demonstrate to other people that we are not fiendish knaves. 

After having spent decades of my life living among religious conservatives of different stripes, I've come to realize that, for many if not most religious adherents, the religion itself is less an expression of a person's metaphysical beliefs as it is an expression of the fact that a person wants to let other people know that he or she is good.

This is why "the one, true faith" is always the one you were born into. It's never the case that the great cosmic truth is the one that was taught to people on a different continent somewhere, it's always the one right there within your own community. There are plenty of people who study religion and come across one that profoundly speaks to them for various reasons, but for the average adherent, it's much more common that people follow the predominant faith because "that's what good people do." They want to be good people, so that's what they do: they go to church, they present themselves as god-fearing people, they wear the right clothes, say the right prayers, and use the right terminology. All of this is to let the people around them know that they are committed to being ethical by the standards of the surrounding community.

It is much more difficult to convince people that you are a good, ethical human being if you belong to a minority faith, or to no faith at all. Believe me, I've tried to explain to people the basis of my ethics and the fact that I live by good morals every day of my life. It's a tough sell to them, because what they know of good people is that good people are "good Christians," or "good Muslims," or whatever the case might be. To them, I have some explaining to do. It might not be fair, but it is what it is; whereas a person wearing a crucifix or a hijab has much less explaining to do within their own communities. Everyone can see that they are people of faith. Additional conclusions about their moral character naturally follow. 

And so it is that religion, especially nowadays, functions as a sort of social shorthand for "I'm a good person." 

I started thinking about this today because I discovered a newer kind of social signal that serves the same function. To a large extent, leftist politics are not so much a set of policy views as they are a signal to like-minded people that "I am a good person." Someone recently told me about his new favorite guitar player, and he was extremely excited to point out that she was also a woman, and a woman of color at that. We all listen to music with our ears, not with our implicit biases, so her gender and race identities were completely beside the point. Why even bring them up? Well, it's simple: he wanted to tell me that not only is this a great guitar player, but rest assured, he himself is also a trusted "ally" in the leftist cause. He didn't know that I didn't care about that, either. (Really, just tell me about the music, please.) But that's how it works.

Similarly, some people are very keen to tell me, when they learn that I used to live in Canada, that they themselves often dream of moving to Canada. I think the assumption there is that we are supposed to bond over the fact that Canada is more appropriately leftist than the savage United States. The information is presented as a signal to me, and I am suppose to use it to note that the person with whom I am speaking is a good person.

They are, in fact, just as much a good person as the other person I spoke to earlier, who might have said goodbye to me by saying, "Have a blessed day." 

It's easy for me, an atheist and a libertarian, to allow these kinds of comments to get on my nerves. Indeed, when I was very young and stuck in an incredibly closed religious conservative community, I considered it to be a kind of bullying. Over the years, however, I've grown to realize that the true purpose is simply to signal conformity to the idea of The Good. For the religious, it is the trappings of religion; for the left, it is the trappings of leftism. The point is not to spread or even to highlight either thing. The point is merely to present oneself as good.

Ever since I realized this, I've been interpreting these signals that way. It reduces a lot of conflict and confusion.

Getting Outside

Last night, I watched the movie Free Solo, which is a National Geographic documentary film about Alex Honnold's successful free solo climb of "El Capitan" in Yosemite National Park. The film has been positively reviewed elsewhere, and I won't do so here. My short review of the film can be summarized as follows: Free Solo is a wonderful film for people who have familiarity with rock climbing or the rock climbing community, while non-climbers may find the pace of the movie a little slow and will almost certainly miss out on some of the technical details of the climb. This movie is not merely "guy does amazing thing," it is specifically "guy who is an amazing climber does an amazing climbing thing." The better you understand climbing, the better you will appreciate the movie. That said, my wife enjoyed it, and she knows nothing about climbing.

Beyond the element of rock climbing in the movie, the film jolted my memory about a great many things I haven't been in touch with for a very long time. Watching the film, I was impressed by the rock climbing community, people who hang out at the same national parks and wilderness areas, pursuing the same outdoor hobbies, with a sort of similar attitude toward nature and toward technology. It's not merely a rock climbing community, it's a subset of the broader "outside" community.

This is a community that surrounded me as I grew up. It's impossible to avoid this community in Utah - or at least, it was when I lived there - because Utah is such a wonderfully special place for outdoor sports. In addition to featuring bar-none the best skiing in the entire world, Utah is home to impressive red rock formations that attract rock climbers and mountain bikers from all over the world. The northern part of the state is home to some of the best single-track mountain biking trails in the Rocky Mountains, along with plenty of limestone climbing routes, national and state parks, mountains for hiking and ice climbing, rivers for kayaking and fishing, reservoirs for boating, and endless routes for trail-running, camping, caving, and exploring. In short, if an outdoor sport exists, there are many beautiful places where you can do it in Utah. I am not sure that any other place in the world has so many great, world-class outdoor sporting locations as Utah does.

Consequently and unsurprisingly, the outdoor sporting community thrives there, so much so that when I moved away I slowly had to adjust to the fact that people who live in other places don't necessarily do something. In Utah, everyone does something. Some fish, some bike, some run, some climb, some ski, some camp, and some do more than one of the above, but everyone does something. Outside of that world, though, a lot of people don't do something. Outside of that world, it's not uncommon to meet people whose only real hobbies involve watching TV and eating. The point I'm trying to make here is that I literally didn't understand this until I left Utah, because I had never really met such people when I was there. The outside community is everywhere there. I hadn't realized how much I missed it until I watched Free Solo.

This outside community is an interesting group. They're a people who like to spend the majority of their time in nature, doing very low-fidelity things - they're campers, not glampers - but who are also extremely tech-savvy. In fact, the outside community has their own thriving world of gadgets and gizmos that many people don't know exist, but again, this is all in support of fundamentally low-tech passtimes. These are people who eat extremely healthy diets, and yet who are also stereotypically passionate about beer and coffee. They're among the most physically fit people in the whole world, and yet they spend little time in gyms and don't tend to bulk-up like body-builders. (Indeed, one of the more impressive things about Alex Honnold is how incredibly strong and muscular he is, despite his somewhat gangly appearance. That's not something you'd encounter in your average gym rat.) The gear they need to do their thing is horrendously expensive, as anyone who has tried to assemble the most basic, fundamental rock climbing kit can attest, and yet they are generally not a community of people who exude affluence or wealth.

Stepping into this world means stepping into a world of people who have made it a point to spend most of their time outside, and who have figured out the means to do so. Why run on a sidewalk when there is a trail available? Why take a car when you can take a bike? Why eat indoors when you can eat outdoors? Why sleep under a roof when you can sleep under the stars? It's a romantic world, borne out of the community's close proximity to the kind of wilderness that is capable of being enjoyed. That is, you're unlikely to meet a great outdoorsman living in the Sahara desert; you're much more likely to meet one at the foot of Mount Rainier. Like people who live on the coast and cannot imagine life in a place where one can wander miles without seeing a drop of water, so the outside community lives in places where there are copious trails and fun things to do outside, and they cannot fathom what it might be like to live in an urban center, or a flat, sprawling suburbia like you find in the South.

It's a great world, and I miss it. I like living in north Texas, but it would be nice to be able to transport my lifestyle and resources from here to a place closer to the community of people I grew up around. Maybe a better choice would be to make small changes to my own life, to see if I can enjoy a little more of that lifestyle than I otherwise would.

Nazis

A coincidence occurred this morning.

One of my libertarian friends on Facebook posted a link to an article outing another "libertarian" as a neo-nazi. This apparent neo-nazi was "mutual [Facebook] friends" with 101 other libertarians of note. That's a conservative estimate, since the person who posted this is surely not Facebook friends with every libertarian of note. So, it is disturbing to my friend that over a hundred famous-among-libertarians people would be friends with a neo-nazi.

Meanwhile, another libertarian friend of mine posted evidence on Facebook of famous philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer's being an actual, literal nazi. Gadamer is not well-liked in libertarian circles, but his ideas have infected the sort of woke left-libertarian social justice and/or disingenuous Niskanen Center crowd. One even rose to defend Gadamer until this libertarian friend of mine presented so much evidence that no one could argue favorably for Gadamer in good conscience.

Gee, are we libertarians getting it from both sides, or what? What the heck is going on with all this nazi stuff, anyway?

I'd like to present a hypothesis that aims to explain the pervasiveness of such pernicious ideas, not just among libertarians, but among people in general. I hope that part of what I write here will unsettle you about your own beliefs. We get nowhere in life by refusing to confront the uncomfortable. Sometimes the world is uncomfortable in ways that threaten our most highly regarded mythology.

Let me begin by saying that this is not a uniquely libertarian problem. Gadamer, for example, is beloved by the left, as is Heidegger. So, the left has been quite affectionate toward the philosophies of nazis. Nor is there any shortage of former clansman among right-wing politicians. Most famously just this past month high profile Republicans and Democrats in Virginia were both outed as people with a history of wearing blackface.

This kind of thing probably seems bewildering to any of you who have never been to the "deep south." It was bewildering to me for a long time, too. I spent the first 30-odd years of my life outside the deep south. Then I moved here and gained some new insight. The ideas behind the Confederacy are still very much alive down here. Not all of those ideas involve race hatred, of course, but we'd be fools to deny the race hatred involved. I have seen a lot of heart-wrenching mistreatment of African Americans since moving down here, to say nothing of mistreatment of Latino and South Asian immigrants. It's bad. And, as far as I can tell, it is based in culture, not in political affiliation, which is to say that it's not a Republican problem or a Democrat problem or a Libertarian problem. It's a people problem. People are messed up, and the Confederacy played a big role in messing people up.

While I'm at it, let me follow a brief tangent here. I recently took a short trip to South Carolina. While in Charleston, I took the time to visit some old Confederate memorials. It was my first time ever having done so, and I can pretty much guarantee you that it will be my last.

It's one thing to think about Confederate memorials in the abstract, statues of war generals and such. One can imagine a big bronze statue of Robert E. Lee on a rearing horse or something. We've all seen statues like this, even if not explicitly Confederate ones.  What makes Confederate memorials different -- what makes them physically nauseating to me, and I mean that literally, as I was moved to physical nausea when I saw these memorials -- is the bizarre, cultlike religious fervor baked into them. There is a sort of "savior complex" idea permeating all of these memorials, religious undertones and references to god, and the statues are super-human. The people depicted in the statues are made almost into Ubermensch. The style reminded me instantly of the art carved into the desert rock of Moab, Utah by a literally insane man:

Anyway, back to nazis. In the early days of nazism, the German government was presented as a sort of miracle. No one could believe that the loser of World War I could make such an economic and social turnaround as Germany had made. For that matter, Germany was one of the great cultural centers of the world leading up to World War II, but also before. All of the great music composers and philosophers were from Germany. All of the great social scientists were German. Many of the great physicists who revolutionized our very understanding of reality were either German or trained in Germany.

This is important because these days nazis have a tendency to be the patsies in our social commentary. "Nazi" is a general term for "mindless evil zombie." To claim anything positive about nazis is to present yourself as a fool, and if you happen to be writing fiction, nazis are the best possible villains because none of us feel any kind of sympathy for nazis whatsoever. Our current understanding of nazis is quite simply that they were all brainwashed dolts who committed great atrocities because they were brainwashed dolts. They are both maximally evil and maximally stupid.

Therefore, to recognize the truth about Germany is to rupture an important story we're telling ourselves. The truth is that Germans were great, Germans were brilliant, Germans achieved wondrous things. Germany was a cultural center of the universe for hundreds of years.

All that cultural greatness culminated in nazism. That's the scary part. The scary thing isn't that stupidity and brainwashing overtook a good nation. The scary part is that nazism is the ultimate result of all the ideas that made Germany wonderful and great prior to the rise of nazis. If you wanted to avoid re-creating a nation of nazis, part of what you'd want to avoid is all the great sociological and philosophical innovation produced by Germans in the 19th Century. You'd want to avoid the conclusions of Marx, and Engels, and Heidegger, and Gadamer. You'd want to throw those things away, recognizing them as the gateway to nazism that they are.

Unfortunately, that is not what people in today's world want to believe. People would much rather believe that nazism is just something Hitler made up that somehow overtook every good brain in Germany, turning it to evil mush. People would much rather believe that there are important things to salvage from Heidegger and Gadamer. People would much rather believe that the Confederacy was a legitimate states' rights movement.

These notions are "escape hatches" designed to protect us from confronting the horrible realities of life. The realities are that nazi Germany was a lot like pre-nazi Germany, and even a lot like post-nazi Germany. People who aided in the slaughtering of Jews had children whose views toward Jews are only improved at the margins. And, indeed, here in the States, the ideas of the Confederacy still infect the south, because the south was inhabited by intelligent people who had abhorrent ideas. Those intelligent people had intelligent children, whose ideas were only marginally less abhorrent. And those children had children, and theirs had children again, and so on marches time. Ideas have slowly improved over time, but we trace their legacy back to something abhorrent.

In order to improve the world, we must learn to discard what is abhorrent. We must not try to salvage a good "states' rights" message out of the Confederacy. We must not try to find worth in Heidegger or Gadamer. We must also not pretend people who believed in the Confederacy or the "reich" were brainwashed morons. We must recognize that terrible, noxious, infectious ideas can very easily take hold of intelligent and good people, and cause them to act in evil ways.

Remembering that ideas can be evil, and that they can infect good people as well as bad people, is the only thing that will help us prevent greater evil in the future.

Now having said that, I realize that it is a core part of Jordan Peterson's message, as well.

The Horrible, Horrible World Of Data

There's an old blog post out there in cyberspace, somewhere, written by "The Last Psychiatrist," but before he had his own website. In it, he makes the rather interesting point that Sigmund Freud's psychological language reflected the language of his time. One example was the use of words like "pressure" and "stress" to describe psychological states, words that seemingly spring from a world in the midst of an industrial revolution preoccupied with literal pressure and stress in the world of machines. He compared that to the psychological language of the Internet Age, which used terms like "connected" or "disconnected." Interesting, like I said. Google it, if you can; it's worth reading.

It certainly made an impact on me. Over time, I've really come to absorb that concept and adopt it into my interpretation of our present reality. We're no longer living in a world of industrial revolution, and it's clear to me, at least, that we have gone past the Internet Age, too. The internet is still here, of course, but our age is no longer about "the Net." If I you asked me, I'd say it's now the Data Age.

*        *        *

Data age distinguishes itself from "Information age," which was the Nineties. The information age was all about transmitting information from one place to another, communicating faster, communicating instantly, passing along information.

No, in a data age, we're not so concerned with information. What we want is data, ie. stuff that can be harvested, ETL-ed, relationally databased, processed in a statistical model, and then summarized. And hopefully monetized, ugh.

But in any case, data is the order of the day. We already take it for granted that every system with which we interact when we access computers or phones will harvest data related to that interaction, and then process it somehow. It will end up on somebody's report, and drive someone's decision to do something; most often a commercial decision of some kind.

We take that part of it for granted, but we seldom consider how this has begun to shape our own individual behavior. One example is fitness tracking. Twenty years ago, almost no one cared how many steps they take in a day; nowadays, we dutifully track it. We track our meals and our hours of sleep -- light sleep and deep sleep, and the amount of each is tracked and understood to matter. We track fitness-related things that we never thought to track before, such as the cadence of our running stride (which is useless), and the vertical oscillation.

I've already written about how all this information isn't worth anything unless we can somehow develop computer programs that solve necessary problems. It's junk, basically. It doesn't do you any good to know that 17% of your monthly grocery budget is spent on beef. What would be useful if someone developed an algorithm that was able to identify all the meat and meat-substitutes present on your monthly grocery bill and developed an app that told you, "If you replaced half your monthly beef with chicken, you'd spend $20 less; if you replaced it with squid, you'd spend $30 less; if you replaced it with lentils, you'd spend $50 less." Or whatever the case might be.

The key point here is that having a collection of data is as pointless as having a collection of bottle caps. Unless you plan on doing something with your data, it is senseless to collect it. That's an easy point to make about businesses who store terabytes upon terabytes of data in huge data centers. But it's an even more important point to make for people who dedicate a part of their day to recording their meals, their weight, their time spent reading, and so on.

To be sure, I record every data point that relates to my health and fitness regimen that I possibly can, but I have a reason for doing this. In my case, I'm trying to keep my blood sugar readings as low as possible. Normal people have absolutely no reason to care what percentage of their last workout was in Heart Rate Zone 3. Really, it doesn't matter.

Naturally, this point connects to yesterday's point about paperwork. Paperwork is, at its core, data collection, and we have begun to believe and to act as if action is impossible without some parallel instance of data. We've gone from "I think, therefore I am" to "Without data, there is no record that I thought anything in the first place, therefore everything is data." Granted, that doesn't quite roll off the tongue like cogito ergo sum.

*        *        *

I started writing this blog post because I was thinking to myself, if today is the Data Age, then what will the next Age be? But in writing down my thoughts, I've shifted my perspective slightly.

Everyone's always talking about "monetizing" what they're doing, as though having ten thousand people view the acoustic cover of "Careless Whisper" you put up on YouTube isn't reward enough, as though those ten thousand people are irrelevant to you unless they become PledgeMusic donors. I think this attitude is crass and self-limiting. I love making money, but it's not everything I do in life. There are some things worth doing merely because they are inherently meaningful: climbing a mountain, making love, teaching your child how to read, listening to the birds in the trees and feeling the sunshine on your face as you drink coffee on your patio on a warm Sunday morning. Some things ought not be monetized. Maybe not even art.

But maybe this modern age of data, of data collection, could turn out to be something that we can make use of. The Beatles are considered the greatest rock band of all time, mostly because there is a historical record that says so; ie., they are thought to be the best because that's what the data says. The data tells a story about the Beatles. Now there can never be "another Beatles," not because four young guys can't make music that good, but because four young guys can't generate 50 years of data that tells the story of their greatness.

…or maybe they can.

One of the big differences between musical artists nowadays and musical artists when I was growing up is their lack of a story. In most cases, this is because there is no story to tell. Pop vixens basically spend their wonder years in voice lessons, then if they're sexy enough they get pitched to a record company that chooses to develop them or not. That's not a story, it's just a sausage-maker.

When I was in high school, I could tell you exactly how the members of my favorite bands met each other, how they developed their musical style, how they went from nothing to something, the story behind the recording of their breakthrough album, and so on.

There's even a bit of showmanship involved in having a story. What's better, "Raj the Magnificent," or "Raj the Magnificent, who tamed three bears with a song when he was just 13, who drank from the waters of Shangri-Upor and kissed the Queen of Daan, and who, after a decade of study under the harpmasters of the Lower Peaks of Cheryn brings his heart-felt lyrical poetry to your home town, for your listening pleasure?"

Not that one should fabricate a story a la Jared Threatin, but why not get your story out there, whatever it is? We're a culture that depends on the existence of data; we trade in memes, because memes are data points; the more memes, the more data; present your ideas as a well-established meme, and perhaps you're one step ahead of the game.

Meme yourself to success!

Ugh, god. I hate the Data Age.

A Soul-Food Model Of Morality

"It is possible to oppose evil without doing violence." Her voice held the simplicity of someone stating an obvious truth.

Perrin grunted sourly, then immediately muttered an apology. "Would it were as you say, Mistress Leya."

"Violence harms the doer as much as the victim," Leya said placidly. "That is why we flee those who harm us, to save them from harm to themselves as much for our own safety. If we do violence to oppose evil, soon we would be no different from what we struggle against. It is with the strength of our belief that we fight the Shadow."

-- Robert Jordan, The Dragon Reborn, pp. 38-39.

If your quest to attain a good end requires that you first do something evil from which you expect the good to come, you have fatally undermined your quest from the get-go. This seemingly obvious proposition may well be the most poorly understood and most often rejected moral precept in the world today.

-- Robert Higgs, Facebook post, December 20, 2018.

I happened to read both of these things within an hour of each other, and it set my mind ablaze for a while.

Coming from the Midwestern United States as I do, I am used to viewing morality from a sort of "redemption framework." In the typical Judeo-Islamo-Christian framework, we do good so that we can meet our salvation in the afterlife. All sin stems from the actions of Adam in the Garden of Eden, and we are doomed to live as imperfect sinners, struggling to be worthy of the love (and rewards) of our god.

Most people I know think of ethics this way, even if they don't believe in any Abrahamic religion; even if they don't believe in any religion at all. The Western view of ethics is that we are struggling against our nature to be better than we are naturally inclined to be. All ethics in Western philosophy are presented in this way. Left to our own devices, we would behave no more ethically than the beasts, so we turn to moral principles and ethical philosophies to improve upon our nature. Doing so successfully means, if not salvation, then at least moral achievement.

There are many strengths to this approach to morality, and I don't mean to criticize it in the slightest. The two quotations I cited above, however, present a way of looking at morality that offers a strength that is not readily available from the traditional Western framework; or at least, one that hasn't played a large role in Western ethics since the time of the Stoics.

An alternate way of seeing ethical behavior is in considering what it does for your "soul" (broadly construed). In this model, good behavior -- ethical behavior -- nurtures your spirit, while bad or sinful behavior is self-corrupting. The Hindus and Buddhists have the concept of karma to serve them here: the more you exhibit good moral behaviors and right thinking, the more it fosters goodness from within you. The more you exhibit bad behaviors and thinking, the more it sort of poisons your life.

It's possible to think of this in a mystical sense, but that's not how I mean it. It is generally true that if you walk around with a smile on your face, being kind to people, your mood improves. One of the key findings of happiness research is that the more a person lives for something larger than himself, the more a person chooses to serve his friends, family and community, the happier he tends to be. The more a person keeps to himself, dwells on negative thoughts, and/or pursues hedonistic pleasure-seeking and pain-aversion, the more unhappy that person tends to feel. It's simple cause-and-effect. As in The Picture of Dorian Gray, the worse is the life we choose to lead, the uglier our picture gets. The better the life we lead, the better the picture.

This is a useful way of thinking about ethics because it reminds us of the journey as well as the destination. Moral valor is not necessarily an achievement, but rather a lifelong set of choices that build upon each other. Start with small decisions to do the right thing, and gradually build up to the point where doing the right thing becomes second nature. And every bad choice you make takes you marginally in the other direction, toward moral poverty.

This need not be either-or, of course. We can see morality both ways, or neither way. But there are strengths to every kind of moral reasoning, so it's nice to keep this particular moral model in mind.

Eastern Enlightenment Versus Western Enlightenment

In general, what Americans try to do when they attempt to pursue "spiritual enlightenment" bears little to no resemblance to what my actual Indian Hindu and Buddhist friends are doing. I can generally map the linguistic terms from one group to the other, but there is a phoniness and a narcissistic aspect to the way Westerners do it.

Ironically, a large part of Buddhism is about denying "the self." However, denying "the self" means something very specific to a South Asian person who was born and raised in a community that stresses the importance of family and legacy. It's a process of reaffirming an ethical commitment to being a good person. Being a good person means caring about your elders, providing for your extended family and community, sacrificing your own needs to the needs of the people around you, so that you can all build a better life together.

By contrast, a Westerner’s pursuit of “spiritual enlightenment” tends to be mostly based on conflating the two distinct definitions of the word “materialism.” Eastern philosophies emphasize the impermanence of material existence; in other words, life is short, so focus on feeding your spiritual needs ahead of your physical needs. But when Westerners talk of the evils of “materialism,” they are most definitely not thinking about their own mortality. Instead, they’re talking about the shallow pursuit of commercial goods. Big difference.

Westerners are born and raised in the most individualistic society the world has ever seen. That’s not a bad thing, but it changes the understanding of what it means to deny “the self.” A spiritual Westerner who “denies the self” doesn’t turn outward to his community and attempt to make it a better place. Instead, he attempts to negate his own needs and desires. He tries to pursue more happiness with fewer material possessions. “I don’t need to buy stuff to be happy, I just need to focus on spiritual enlightenment.” And “focusing on spiritual enlightenment” is, to a Westerner, a goal unto itself. It apparently involves more meditation, more time spent reading books about meditation, more time spent learning about “chakras.” More experimental use of psychedelic drugs. This couldn’t be further from the Easterner’s practice of Eastern religion.

In fact, this is an enormous difference in perspectives. To the Easterner, “spiritual fulfilment” isn’t some mumbo-jumbo that you get in a cedar-plank room with scented candles and new age music. It’s something that you gain from turning your personal misery into someone else’s happiness. Are you feeling sad? Then, get over it and help your brother study for his upcoming math exam. Some girl broke your heart? That sucks – but here, take the garbage out and then go spend the afternoon helping your grandmother shop for a new saree. The point of selflessness in this environment is to heal your misery by focusing on what is “truly important.” And in Eastern society, what is “truly important” is very specific. Be a good spouse; do charity work; engage with your community; spend time with your family; raise some kids; and so on.

When you think about it, this isn’t all that different from the perspective you’d get in a Westerner’s church or synagogue. Traditional Western religions all take a similar view of selflessness. They advise you to get out of your own head when you’re feeling anguished and to “do the work of the Lord,” which generally means community service, kind gestures, charitable giving, etc. It should come as no surprise, then, that most socially liberal Easterners view Buddhist and Hindu practices not as a path to new age enlightenment, but rather as extremely conservative belief systems. At the end of the day, Eastern religion delivers the same advice to Easterners that Western religion delivers to Westerners.

It’s striking to me that hardcore conservatives in South Asian societies are using exactly the same language as hardcore liberals in North American societies, and yet these groups mean entirely different things when they use this terminology. Globalization and the internet have given people a common set of words that everyone uses to describe their experiences, but it hasn’t yet guaranteed that various societies mean the same thing when they say the same words. It appears that our languages have converged, but our meta-language hasn’t done so quite yet.