On Credulity.

JUST A LITTLE WHILE AGO at a Saṅgha picnic one of our group remarked that an elaborate crop circle had appeared in fields near where they live. The person began to speculate about the mystical symbolism of the crop circle and seemed unaware that crop circles are all artificially made. I mentioned that the original crop circle makers—Doug Bower and Dave Chorley—had confessed their hoax and demonstrated their method. My informant, tried to dodge the fact of the hoax, and pursue the mystical significance of the new crop circle. I'm puzzled by the attraction of mystical explanations for things—spirits, aliens, etc.—especially when there are more straightforward answers. When the original crop circle makers have confessed and showed how they did it, and crop circles are now routinely used by the advertising industry, why are people still attracted to the idea that crop circles have mystical significance?

What really sparked me off, however, was watching a documentary, Messiah [1], in which Derren Brown, an entertainer who specialises in using the power of suggestion and an ability to 'read' people's body language and facial expressions to create the illusion of psychic powers. Brown is different in that he admits he is a showman, and explains how he does what he does. In Messiah, Brown travels to the USA where he is virtually unknown, and proceeds to try to obtain personal endorsements from leading members of New Age or Alternative groups: psychics, mediums, alien abductees, and an evangelist. The evangelist is impressed though not willing to publicly endorse Brown, while the others—experts in their 'fields'—are entirely taken in and enthusiastically offer to endorse him.

In other words Brown uses his skills to convince a group of psychics that he is real psychic; a couple of alien abductees that he was abducted by aliens and can now tell them their medical histories; a group of strangers that he is in touch with their dead relatives (and knows intimate details of their relationships); and a prolific New Age publisher that he can record and play back her dreams with his dream device. With the evangelist he demonstrates an ability to instantly convert a roomful of sceptics to belief in God. He actually does this with a simple touch in one case, and by imitating those evangelists who "bring down the Holy Spirit" in another case, though his method for the rest is clearly plain old hypnotism. The pastor alone is cautious about accepting Brown on face value, but he is still visibly impressed.

A similar hoax—Project Alpha [2]—was perpetrated by the magician James Randi, aka The Amazing Randi. He commissioned two amateur sleight-of-hand magicians—Steve Shaw and Michael Edwards—to convince a team of researchers at the University of Washington that they could bend spoons with their psychic powers along the lines of the infamous faker Uri Geller. This they successfully did, managing to bypass all of the 'scientific scrutiny' of the research team, including video cameras! Shaw and Edwards continued with the hoax for a considerable time, even after it became clear to the university that when the experimental protocols were tightened up that the two could not perform any psychic feats. They became minor celebrities travelling the country to demonstrate their "powers". However eventually Randi himself admitted the fraud and the credulity of the "psychic" community was painfully exposed. Project Alpha subsequently inspired a number of copy-cat hoaxes with more or less the same result.

Randi has exposed other fraudulent psychics. Recently in the UK psychic Sally Morgan was exposed as a fraud. [4] She apparently uses the same technique as seen in the lesser known Steven Martin film Leap Of Faith: where assistants gather information from the crowd as they take their seats, and feed it to Martin through a concealed ear piece. However being exposed does not necessarily mean that a psychic is put out of business. In 1986 Randi exposed Peter Popoff as the same kind of fraud on Johnny Carsons's Tonight show, but he is back with a vengeance fleecing the credulous and making tens of millions of dollars doing it.

The message seems to be that people want to believe. They want to believe in spirits, in immaterial beings and gods, in mysterious energies, in crystal vibrations, in psychic powers. People want to believe in magic. This desire to believe affects our judgement: it affects what we pay attention to, and the weight that we give to what we see and hear. The effect of this is that what we believe is apparently confirmed. It's called confirmation bias. For every "proof" that people have psychic powers, there is a demonstration of cynical fraud. So we should at least be very sceptical about psychic powers. But a lot of us are not. We only look for evidence that confirms our views, and we wilfully ignore any contradictory evidence.

But more than simply wanting to belief, people don't want to not believe - they consciously reject the rational alternatives to magical thinking. People apparently don't want to believe in science which they see as prosaic, mundane, and uninspiring. Accurate, but dull and limited. Whereas magic is exciting and has infinite possibility. My own experience of science is completely the reverse of this: my encounters with science continue to expand my mind, make the world seem more amazing, more wonderful, more inspiring, more alive, less limited.

The real down side of credulity is that every day people are being ripped off by unscrupulous con-artists. For instance they are paying for 'healing' that at best is the placebo effect, but which as worst is harmful. Recently in the UK the writer Simon Singh was sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association because he said "... it happily promotes bogus treatments" and that the treatment could be "lethal". [3] The law suit was eventually dropped as it became clear that they would not win. Singh had made truthful statements, based on published research, even if he was being sarcastic. One cannot be sued for being sarcastic in the UK, nor for being a science journalist how reports on research. This is not to say that science or medicine has all the answers. Patently it does not. Or that scientists and doctors have not harmed people. They have. But within medicine and science there are checks and balances. Magical thinking allows for no checks and balances. If something goes wrong it is because you did not believe. And of course we do know that the placebo effect is dependent on you believing you've had an effect treatment, but this is not very reassuring if we are genuinely ill.[5]

Somehow, because science undermines magical thinking, some people see it as destroying meaning, of making the world less meaningful, though only because "meaning" is associated with "magic"! I have never agreed with this. Knowledge comes from paying close attention to how things are. And as über-scientist Richard Feynman said:

"Science—knowledge—only adds to the excitement, the mystery, and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts." [6]

In the past I have been critical of the way Buddhists present their own beliefs as simple representations of Reality. (e.g. Rescuing the Dharma from Fundamentalists) This so-called Reality is often simply an intellectual regurgitation of metaphysical theories found in popular books on Buddhism. As such it's a blind belief not rooted in experience. David Chapman has referred to this as "effing the ineffable". And since we are explicitly against this approach to religion we Buddhists appear to be incoherent and self-contradictory at times. Buddhists, like other human beings, want to believe, and are often credulous in their approach to the traditional Buddhist narratives. Such credulousness is not helpful, but breaking out of it requires us open our minds to the possibility that we are wrong.

~~oOo~~

Notes.

1. Derren Brown. Messiah.
2. James Randi. Project Alpha.
3. 'Beware the spinal trap: Some practitioners claim it is a cure-all but research suggests chiropractic therapy can be lethal.' Guardian.19 Apr 2008.
4. 'Psychic Sally Morgan hears voices from the other side (via a hidden earpiece).' Guardian. 20 Sept 2011.
5. For a discussion of the other side of the placebo effect look at: The Dark Side of the Placebo Effect: When Intense Belief Kills; and What's the Harm?
   
6. Feynman. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. BBC

Tim Minchin. If you open your mind too much your brain will fall out.

Taking the Not-given

©

I've just come across the website Buddha Torrents which specialises in linking to illegally copied and uploaded Dharma books. You would have thought that facilitating the stealing of Dharma books would be a no-brainer - just don't do it - but many Buddhists apparently feel quite comfortable with theft of electronic files when they would not walk into a shop and steal the physical book. Let me just be quite clear here. Copying is theft. All those pirated books, DVDs, and CDs are stolen. There is no grey area here. Consider the wording of the second precept:

adinnādānā veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi
I undertake the training step of refraining from taking the not given.

Since I've covered the general outline of the precepts in other posts [1] I'll just concentrate on the main word: adinnādānā. The Pāli word dinna means 'given, granted, presented'. It's a past participle of the verb √dā 'to give'. In a Buddhist context it frequently refers to alms given to bhikkhus. The word is used in the negative adinna 'not-given, not-granted, not-presented'. The other part of the compound is ādānā which is a noun from the same verbal root. The stem dāna means 'that which is given, donated, granted', while the prefix ā- reverses the direction and gives it the meaning 'that which is taken, taking'.

If we take a step back into the Proto-Indo-European roots of the words, we see that the original form was *do meaning 'to give'. The word comes into Latin as donum 'gift' from which we get the English words donation, & donor. The root also underlies the words date, and time. [For more on this branch see the Online Etymological Dictionary].

So our word is a-dinna-ādāna 'taking the not-given'. In the precept verse the compound is in the ablative case - giving the sense of 'I undertake to abstain from taking what is not given'.

Clearly this is a precept about property. You cannot take someone's property against their will except by force or deception. If they give you everything they own of their own free will, in full knowledge of the consequences, that's fine. But if you take even a penny without being first offered it, then you are involved in doing something to that person against their will, i.e. doing violence. So it's not only about property, but an extension of the first precept against causing harm, with a focus on property.

It is true that as Buddhists we preach that we ourselves should not be attached to material possessions. I tend to agree with the line of reasoning that an abundance of material possessions causes more misery that it prevents. However without a roof over our heads and food to eat most of us don't cope very well. So ruling out all possessions for everyone would cause more pain that it relieved. It's not up to us to judge for other people what constitutes a minimal level of possessions. The precepts are carefully phrased in the first person: samādiyāmi 'I undertake'. It is we who undertake the training and our judgements should be directed to ourselves. So our non-attachment should make us less likely to take what is not given (in theory). If we feel that a close friend is in danger of breaking this precept, we might have a quiet word with them, tell them what we have observed and related our concerns in a kindly way. But there is little scope for standing in judgement on others. This creates a tension for people raised to believe that justices involves determining guilt, and meting out punishments.

However Sangharakshita has expanded the context of this precept beyond material possessions. He includes things like a person's time or their energy. If someone doesn't have time for us, we should not try to detain them. If they don't want to, for instance, listen to our problems, then we cannot make them. Each time we take the not given we seek to negate the other person; we seek to impose our will, and our ego, over theirs. It is a subtle form of violence. So this precept can be seen as an extension of the first precept against doing violence to other beings.

I'm going to assume that we understand the problem of doing violence and move on to consider some more specific issues.

In 2000 the internet music sharing service Napster was taken to court by the the band Metallica along with rapper Dr Dre. A separate case was brought by several major record labels. Judges ruled that Napster were indeed breaking the law by facilitating the sharing of illegal copies of music. But for some reason this remains a grey area. Lots of people I know are copying and not paying for music, films, and software. If what was being shared was physical property the issue would be clear cut. We would not condone either the burglar, nor the fence, nor any part of an operation which facilitated someone stealing our property. But apparently we are happy to do so with music. Music is different of course. Digital music is immaterial, very easily reproduced or copied, and it is very difficult for the average consumer to relate the mp3 file back to the performer.

Musician's make their livelihood from selling that music. There are some who are saying that the new media calls for new models of distribution and ownership. I notice that these people are typically already successful and wealthy, i.e. they do not have much to lose. They usually got into the position of being successful and wealthy by selling albums the old fashioned way. Start up bands, with no money, are not so convinced that giving away their music is such a good thing. Once you give people something for nothing you set up expectations.

Some people argue that so much money is made that it hardly matters if a few copies are made. But this is not an argument from Buddhist ethical principles. It seeks to bypass the principle of not taking the not given, and replace it with taking what will not be missed. And who says it won't be missed? The music industry say they are missing that revenue and record labels and music shops are struggling to stay in business. Whether or not this is good for the music is irrelevant to the Buddhist ethical case, because someone has come out and explicitly said: "do not copy this music without paying us for it." Music is not given except within the limits set out by music industry. Whether or not we think these limits are moral, ethical, or legal, is irrelevant because the relevant precept is about the not given. And outside the framework of buying CDs of MP3s the thing is not given.

There is such a thing as fair use. For instance in this blog I often cite the words of other people, from books and articles that form the basis of their livelihood. On the whole they ask that we do not copy their work wholesale, or use it without acknowledgement. So I quote little bits and endeavour to accurately state where the text comes from. This seems fair enough, and if we did not have this provision then any kind of dialogue about literature (scholarly or otherwise) would not be feasible. Indeed I believe I have raised the profile of several authors by bringing their work to the attention of a new audience.

I also use images. Images are usually classed as a whole work, so copying them is usually considered to be outside of fair use. I try to use images that are clearly free of copyright restrictions. Sometimes it's hard to tell, and I have to confess that I sometimes interpret fair use in my favour. I still stick to stating where I got the image, and when it's clear who made it I make sure I include that information. My purpose is to decorate a blog post, not suggest that I am an artist. I suspect that I could be criticised for this practice, and I'm always ready to remove images without a fight. So far no one has ever asked me to remove an image from this blog. But I would if asked to, even if fair use suggested I might get away with it. I do get a few pennies a day from Google ads and Amazon referrals but given the time I spend on this it could hardly be called a profit making venture. In my books, however, I had to be a lot more assiduous about observing copyright because the law says that where you are selling something then fair use provisions don't apply. I can't make money from someone else's work. This seems fair to me.

Buddhists are not always scrupulous when it comes to the internet and taking the not given. I have had several people copy my entire mantra website, for instance, and present it as their own work. They get quite hostile when I tackle them on the illegality and immorality of this. I've been called some nasty things because I've acted to protect my work from being degraded by poor copies. But taking the not given seems clear enough. And unless we take such principles seriously then we aren't likely to make progress, so it's in our best interests to keep the precepts.

~~oOo~~

I've had second thoughts about my addendum, and have removed it.

Notes

1. The Third Precept; the Fifth Precept.