Changing the World: a Case Study.

This post, the last I have planned for this blog, is an extended version of an essay I submitted to Śabda the newsletter that our Order use to keep in touch (it's like a once a month manual forum). Many Buddhists are interested in changing the world. Over my lifetime the world has changed significantly, and I thought it might be interesting to write up some reflections on this change, and how it was achieved.

The world changed in 1971. 

In 1971 President Nixon unilaterally dismantled the Bretton Woods Agreement. This multi-lateral agreement on monetary policy was put in place to help the world recover financially from WWII. It spawned the IMF and the World Bank. Part of Bretton Woods was the gold standard. The countries involved agreed to fix the exchange rate of their currency to the value of the US Dollar, while the US agreed to peg the value of their currency to the value of gold. The expense of the war in Vietnam was putting great pressure on the US economy. Then the French began to swap their US dollars for gold. This caused a drain on gold reserves in the US and choked their money supply. In the face of these problems Nixon may not have had much choice but to withdraw from the gold standard. This is something for goldbugs to keep in mind.  As we will see this was the thin edge of the wedge.

In the same year the UK introduced the Competition and Credit Control Act. Economists joke about this really being 'all competition and no control'. The main effect of these changes was deregulation, which allowed private sector debt to begin to accumulate. From 1945 to 1971 there was a period of economic stability, with no notable crises. The IMF tell us that since 1970 "there have been 147 bank crises, 218 currency crises and 66 country-financing crises". In 1971 the motto of Polonious was decisively thrown out. The world began to borrow to finance consumption and to gamble on asset prices.

During the 1980s politicians influenced by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of economics, also known as Neo-classical economics, gained power. They were aided in part by divisions amongst the other dominant school of economic thought: the Keynesians. It was the ideas of John Maynard Keynes which had produced the post-war economic stability. Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the USA (and Lange in NZ) implemented policies inspired by the Chicago School. These policies are also known as Neo-liberalism. One of the main things they did was pursue deregulation of the economy. This pursuit was based on an ideological view of markets which they said could be left to themselves to sort out prices. Underlying this view was the 19th century utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. And overlaying it was an over-estimation of the power of computers to predict the behaviour of the economy, and the validity of the computer models being used to make predictions. All around the first world Neo-liberal policies removed trade barriers, sold off public assets, down sized government departments, and took the deregulation of finance almost to it's logical conclusion.

Debt fuelled consumption and speculation, especially the latter, pushed up prices causing inflation. Inflation required pay rises, and further price rises. Until it all collapsed in a recession. Then began to pile up again. Each cycle was a little worse because some of the debt carried over. In the Third World it rapidly lead to ruin and poverty for many. Africa succumbed first in the 1970s. South American countries were hit in the 1980s. In South-East Asia ruin and poverty came in the late 1990's. Now the First World faces ruin.

The response to repeated crises was to further deregulate the economy, and particularly finance. In the UK this was done by a Labour government. The Labour party still describe themselves as "socialist", but alongside typically socialist policies like expansion of the welfare state, they pursued an extreme Neo-Liberal approach to the finance sector. This further deregulation allowed for more debt, and more risky lending. Banks, who make money from debt, were happy to oblige. Successive governments around the world followed similar policies.The whole thing gained momentum so that debts accumulated exponentially.

The finance sector generated huge amounts of income but concentrated it in the hands of a tiny minority. It generated even hugher amounts of debt. Today the UK is the most indebted country in the world. Recent estimates place our private sector debt at 450% of GDP, which includes household debt (including mortgages) at 100%. Government debt by comparison is just 81% of GDP.

The most recent crisis exposed corruption in the finance sector, and the massive scale of our indebtedness. Five years later we're still going down hill, with Europe teetering on the brink (of what?). Many first world banks are technically insolvent, but somehow reporting record profits and paying out large bonuses. Now we learn that some have been manipulating interest rates. They are propped by government borrowing amounting to a trillion pounds. Executive pay is increasing exponentially. Unemployment is high. So much for the "free market". What this approach to banking amounts to is national socialism. However the practitioners of this peculiar form of socialism for the rich, are still emphasising that the poor must pursue a pure form of free-market capitalism. Many intellectuals are pointing to disturbing parallels with Europe in 1931.

The same trend has exacerbated environmental problems. At the moment there are direct and indirect incentives to exploit resources at the maximum rate with no regard to the environmental consequences. Governments seem paralysed by fear of the business sector. And business and finance spend billions of dollars/pounds lobbying for favourable laws. The political will to address any of these problems does not exist at present. And those economists who did predict the credit crunch of 2007 are saying that we have not seen the worst. There is another massive credit crunch coming in 2012 or 2013.

How did this happen?

The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians. In most of these groups the movement against the system is participated in only by minorities. Yet, these often are the most articulate, the most vocal, the most prolific in their writing and speaking.

Lewis Powell Memo

The second major event of 1971 was the Lewis Powell Memorandum to the US Chamber of Commerce entitled "Attack on American Free Enterprise System". Powell characterised the situation as a war in which business interested were threatened by social change emphasising the values of cooperation and mutual aid (our values). The memo makes a series of detailed proposals for an aggressive response by conservative businessmen.

Businessmen should endow universities with chairs to teach conservative business practices, and financially support conservative institutes. Powell proposed that a number of very well resourced think-tanks be set up. These would help to create and promote a consistent, potent message. Deregulation was central to their agenda. They needed to train spokesmen in communicating the conservative message, and create booking agencies to help organise speakers. They also invested in media companies to ensure access. They did all this, and needless to say they funded conservative political parties. Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court two months after the memo was published.

At the same time US conservatives began to politicise fundamentalist Christians who had been disengaged to that point, creating a whole new constituency of millions of ultra-conservative voters.


Conservatives all over the world have benefited from this coordinated strategy to hijack democracy in the USA, and fight a war against their own people. A steady stream of graduates with PhDs in what amounts to conservative ideology, finds jobs in universities and think-tanks to explore and publish their ideas and influence new generations of students and intellectuals particularly economists. There are close linked between Neo-conservative though and Neo-classical Economics. Through manipulation and control of the media a constant presence of the conservative message is maintained. Powell's memo is one of the most important documents of the 20th century, it is the founding charter of the Neo-conservative religion.

However I should sound a note of caution. Some historians have noted that there is little evidence that Powell Memo had any real impact. Even so it remains iconic because it sums up the mood of conservatives in the US at the time, and it summarises what actually happened in terms of the mobilisation of conservatives.

As a result of these policies conservative ideas have been at the forefront of politics. Deregulation has wrecked the world's economy, and helped to wreck the environment. Conservatives set the agendas on which elections are fought (they are doing so again in the UK right now). Business policy became political policy; business values became social values. The world changed because conservatives captured the cognitive map, dominated the debate by choosing the frames, and made laws that represented their values.

Something that I did not say in my original essay was that during this time the hippies were busy taking mind addling drugs, catching crabs and growing their hair long. As John Lydon said with venom in an interview from the late 1970s the problem with hippies was that "they're complaisant". While people in the 1970's counter-culture were tuning in, turning on and dropping our, the conservatives where tuning in, turning on and taking over. This is relevant because many of the leaders of First World Buddhism were hippies or felt inspired by the counter-culture. Some still do feel inspired by that era. But the hippies changed nothing. Their self-indulgent abdication of civil responsibility simply allowed the conservatives to dominate political life.


This how American businessmen succeeded in changing the world. They certainly created a much bigger impact on the world than Buddhism has done. It might be argued that we are few and poorly resourced. But the basic problem seems to be that we don't care, or don't care enough. There are plenty of people out there to make common cause with. We suffer from what Glenn Wallis has called sufficiency. We think Buddhism is a magic panacea entirely sufficient for all purposes be it psychological integration, emotional positivity, and even social change. So we don't look elsewhere, and we don't make common cause with people who share our values. And honestly, most people share our values at least to some extent. We're not as special as we'd like to think, and that feeling of specialness really is a problem for us because it's an expression of ego.


Now What?

I ended by report to the order with this question: "OK, I've understood this, now what?" This was as much to do with the word limit on reports as anything. I'm quite clear on some of the measures I'd like to see in response.

Firstly we must as a priority involve ourselves in civic society. This may require some education. But there are plenty of resources for that in this day and age. We Buddhists almost always have a strong sense of values. At the very least we should all book a time to go and meet our elected representative and try to communicate our values to them. We're about 1% of the UK population, but we're clustered and if we all visited our representative then we'd be heard. Democracy only works if people participate. Your representative can only represent you if they know you. But we need to go further. We need to engage in whatever public forums are open to us and speak up about our values and aspirations (this will require a major effort to de-jargonise Buddhist-speak else no one will understand what we are saying).

There are many arguments for and against this, but for me the bottom line is that if you take altruism seriously as a virtue, then you need to act to resist laws and policies which visit suffering on people. If we want society to reflect our Buddhism values, then making a few thousand converts is not enough. We need to influence public policy, which we do by being personally involved.

Secondly there are pressing problems such as environmental degradation that need concerted action. Concerted political will only emerges when there is a clear public will. If we're not even in the discussion our voices won't be heard. We live in a world where in some places people are dying of starvation and malnutrition, and in other places dying from obesity. There is no shortage of food on planet earth, even for a much larger population. Speaking as an over-weight Buddhist, I say there is no excuse for being a fat Buddhist (except in some very rare glandular disorders). Charities and Aid are only sticking plasters. Necessary for the short-term but long term we need to be thinking about changing the political systems we live in. In the First World we have the greatest chance of making these changes precisely because we live in relatively free democracies.

My third point follows on from this. The major powers continually act with greedy self-interest when dealing with the rest of the world. If we had acted more honourably at key points in history, then there would be considerably less war in the world now. For instance if the European powers had kept their promise to the Arabs lead by Prince Faisal at the end of WWI then our relations with the entire Middle East would be very different. The UK and the USA governments in particular have behaved abominably right up to the present. We have to let them know 'not in my name'.

Lastly we need to understand how political debates are framed, and set about reframing them. And here I think I've gained valuable experience in dealing with how Buddhist debates are framed. What I reject is the traditional ultraconservative fundamentalist framing of Buddhism; and Buddhism as a supernatural panacea. And it is very interesting to note the religious tone to Neo-Liberal discourse, and the idea of the supernatural ability of markets to determine price (which reminds me very much of karma). I've already written several blog posts on the Renegade Economist site regarding these issues: Framing the Debate Part I and Part 2, and Distorting Darwin or How the West Was Won.

~~oOo~~

So that's it for Jayarava's Raves. I have nothing else planned out to say on Buddhism. In a sense I feel I've said what I wanted to say about it. If you read one essay a week it would take you six years to read them all. I have been working on packaging some of the essays up into a book (or perhaps two) but I have no deadline in mind at present.

Now I want to engage with the institutions of society more, to take part in the public debate. I will certainly do all this as a Buddhist, and I will draw on the Dharma. However I won't be setting out to convert people to Buddhism, only to encourage them (and myself) towards paying attention, expressing empathy and altruism, and finding contentment in their lives. And after all it's only a blog, and not even very popular.

Thanks to all my readers over the years. And Thanks especially to my friend Ann 'Pema Yutso' Palomo for inspiring the whole project.

The 'Mind as Container' Metaphor

"Whatever complex biological and neural processes go on backstage, it is my consciousness that provides the theatre where my experiences and thoughts have their existence, where my desires are felt and where my intentions are formed."

Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy

ONE OF THE MOST fundamental metaphors we use when talking about mind is: the mind is a container. The container prototype is very important in terms of how we interact with the world. A container is a physically finite and bounded space, with a clear distinction between inside and outside. Containers often, but not always, have lids which seal the inside from outside, or vice versa.

Our body is a physically a container with a sealable opening at either end: a mouth and an anus. We put food into our body via our mouth. The mouth itself is a container, because we put food into it as well. Various things happen inside our body And shit comes out of our anus. Similarly we breath into our lungs (which are inside our body) and out. Virtually all other animals follow a similar body plan, and set of biological processes.

But these metaphors have implications which go well beyond the way we talk. George Lakoff and his colleagues, especially Mark Johnson, have shown that abstract thought is always metaphorical, and that the metaphors we draw on for abstract thought are often based on how we physically interact with the world.

So when "a thought comes into our head" there are two metaphorical processes happening. Firstly we are allowing that our head is a kind of container. This might be obvious because physically our skull is a hollow chamber of bone filled with our brain. It also has some extrusions attached and several openings. But the head here is also standing for the what goes on 'in' the head, a form of metaphor called metonymy: where a part stands for the whole, and sometimes vice versa. Our head is the container of thoughts; that is the head here stands for the mind as the container of thought: the thought is in [the container of] the mind, which is in [the container of] the head. The head is a particular kind of container, more like a room which we inhabit. Experientially when the thought comes into my head, I become aware of it because it enters the space "I" also occupy.

The second metaphorical process that is happening is that both "I" and the thought are (metaphorically) solid objects with shape and mass. We can take an idea and turn it over in our heads, kick it around; we juggle priorities, manipulate data and crunch numbers; we weigh alternatives, and can be weighed down by our cares. "I" am the same kind of object because I exist in the same domain as the ideas - thinking goes on in my head, and I am thinking my thoughts.

As metaphors there is absolutely nothing wrong with these abstractions. Abstraction allows us to be much more sophisticated in how we interact with the world and each other. Abstraction allows us to use our imagination to consider how things might be, to think about new ways of using tools for example, or new ways to modify tools to do a certain job. In part at least this ability to abstract is related to a set of neurons called mirror neurons. These neurons are active when we do an action, but also when we see an action being performed by someone else. If the action is a facial expression, then something interesting happens: observing the action our own neurons become active and we have a sense of what it would be like to have that facial expression. This allows to know how someone is feeling by observing their face (and their body language and listening to the tone of voice). This is a very useful facility to have.

However we are not usually aware of what we are doing: we have the result without understanding the working. In fact the working only became visible when we started to use powerful real-time brain scanning techniques. When we respond to a smile we aren't aware of the mechanisms that allow us to parse the visual information, recognise the face and the expression, and translate that into an internal state that we can feel, and then formulate a response. We just smile back or mutter humbug or whatever.

Similarly when a thought comes into our head we see this is a naive realistic way: just as though something with shape and mass has entered a room in which we were already an occupant. For many centuries philosophers took this metaphor as real and asked a lot of questions about the container and the nature of the container. Alternatively as the ODP definition says we think of consciousness as a special kind of room (a theatre) in which we observe the experiences we have, with the implication that we are the audience watching the action on the stage. Since we started to learn about the function of the brain we have extended the metaphor to make the brain the container of consciousness or personality.

But as comfortable as this way of referring to our minds it's still just a metaphor, not a reality. Remember that a metaphor is when you explain one thing in terms as though it were something else. It's very important to remember what it is you are describing, which is a hard thing to keep in mind. The mind is also sometimes a leaky container!

Most people, I think, would be surprised to learn that this metaphor is not universal. Luhrmann (2011) surveying the ethnographical literature on hallucinations, notes some research conclusions: "The Iban [tribe of Borneo] do not have an elaborated idea of the mind as a container". (p.79) In the context of research on psychosis this means that "the idea that someone could experience external thoughts as placed within the mind or removed from it was simply not available to them."

We also know that people experience the complete breakdown of the sense of in-here and out-there under certain circumstance (e.g. Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke). So the metaphor is not universal, not hardwired. It is a culturally conditioned aspect of a virtual model which our organism generates for the purposes of optimising its interactions with the environment. But the metaphor is so pervasive in English that it's very difficult for me to write a sentence about the virtual model without referencing the mind as container metaphor.

I might add that all of the aspects of consciousness are similarly contingent and plastic.

I came across a quote from Wittgenstein recently which seems apposite: "meaning is use". By this he seems to have meant that a word takes it's meaning not from a relationship with the object it names, nor by the ideas the objects engender, but only from the way that speakers use the word. There is something in this. However I would add some caveats because the study of sound symbolism, and embodied cognition don't allow for a strict application of 'meaning is use'. Research in sound symbolism tells us that the sounds we use to make words are symbols, and that there is a relationship between the symbols we choose and the objects and events we are observing or thinking of. The case I've been making above is that how we think, the very metaphors we use to represent abstract ideas are based on how we physically interact with the world. So, yes 'meaning is use' but use is not arbitrary, it is motivated (to use de Saussure's term) by these existing relationships, i.e. it operates within limits and tends towards pre-determined states.

The thing I wanted to draw out is that the question 'what is consciousness' might not be a sensible qustion. We might accurately answer that consciousness is the experience of being aware, of having a sense of agency and a first-person perspective. In effect there might be no 'Problem of Consciousness'.  There is certainly an experience, but does it point to a real container, a real theatre in which we experience consciousness? The answer would seem to be that is does not.

I think this would be the Buddhist answer as well, or it would be outside of Western Buddhism. As I suggested above it's very difficult for use Westerners to think of consciousness at all without unconsciously invoking a metaphor which we habitually take to be real. The very terminology we use asserts the reality of the abstractions and metaphors we use to describe the experience. In a targeted, but not comprehensive search I have not found viññāṇa being used in the sense of a container of experience in Pāli. Indeed just what viññāṇa refers to is not entirely clear to me except that it is an essential component of perception; and that it is consistently distinguished from the sense objects (rūpa, sadda, etc) and from the sense organs (cakkhu, sota, etc), and that it comes in six varieties (cakkhu-viññāṇā, sota-viññāṇa, etc.) including mano-viññāṇa. So the one thing this does not look like is the theatre of experience. If, for instance the Buddhist texts say that we experience vedanā in viññāṇa, then I have yet to find the passage where they do. In what sense does viññāṇa resemble our Western conceptions of consciousness at all? My response would be that it doesn't resemble it at all.

One can broaden search quite easily by looking for viññāṇasmiṃ/viññāṇe (the locative singular), which we would expect to translate 'in consciousness' if viññāṇa were a container. We find many examples of this grammatical form in Pāli. One of them is indeed treating viññāṇa a metaphorical container. At M iii.18 and many other places the assutavā [i.e. the ignorant, or uninformed person] seeks (in vain) for self in viññāṇa and viññāṇa in self. But it's clear that the view being described is not one that the knowledgeable Buddhist would subscribe to.

At M i.139 we find another use of the locative (with the sense of 'with reference to'). Here it is the well-informed (sutavā) disciples of the nobles, and they become fed up (nibbindati) with reference to rūpa, vedanā, saññā, saṅkhāra and viññāṇa. At M i.230 a materialist says of the khandhas: With viññāṇa [and the others] as self (atta) a person (purisapuggala) from resting in viññāṇa (viññāṇe patiṭṭhāya) produces merit or non-merit. Gotama proceeds to demolish the views of the materialist, treating the khandhas as he customarily does: not mine, not me, not myself.

And that accounts for all of the occurrences of viññāṇāsmiṃ/viññāṇe I found in a brief survey of the nikāyas. No doubt there are others, but they don't stand out. Buddhist texts, so far as I can tell, are aware that some misguided people do use the 'mind as container' metaphor, but the Buddhist Theory of Mind does not. For Buddhist thinkers there is no theatre of experience, there is just experience. The implication for us is that the experience of being in a theatre of experience, is just another experience. Perhaps the difference lies in the lack of theatres in Iron Age India and the largely outdoor lifestyle of the Buddhists. Virtually all of the action of the Pāli Canon takes place outside.

In any case we think very differently from the ancient Buddhists about the mind. Recall also that they did not see emotion as a separate category of experience but lumped it in the citta. (Cf Emotions in Buddhism) Judging by their language we can see that they lived in very a different world to us. Our conceptions about the world, the mind, and life generally are often not applicable to the past; nor theirs to the present. Our scientists and philosophers have spent time and resources looking for this theatre, and ironically neuroscientists seem to be confirming that our ancient forebears were right: mind as a container is a figment, generated by hypostasizing a metaphor we once used to describe the experience of having experiences.

~~oOo~~

This essay was inspired by reading: On Containers and Content, with a Cautionary Note to Philosophers of Mind, by Eric Schwitzgebel.

Mind Metaphors in Pāli

seed

iti kho, ānando, kammaṃ khettaṃ viññāṇaṃ bījaṃ taṇhā sineho... hīnāya dhātuyā viññāṇaṃ patiṭṭhitaṃ (AN i.232 )
Thus, Ānanda, action is a field, cognition is a seed, and craving is sap... cognition is established on a low level. 

lamp

Seyyathāpi bhikkhave, kūṭāgāraṃ vā kūṭāgārasālā vā uttarāya vā dakkhiṇāya vā pācīnāya vā vātapānā. suriye uggacchante vātapānena rasmi pavisitvā kvāssa patiṭṭhitāti. (SN 12.64 )
Just as if, bhikkhus, a roofed house or roofed hall with windows in the north, south or east. When the sun rises where do rays land when they come through the windows? 

fire

Yaññadeva bhikkhave paccayaṃ paṭicca uppajjati viññāṇaṃ tena teneva saṅkhaṃ gacchati... Seyyathāpi bhikkhave yaññadevāpaccayaṃ paṭicca aggi jalati, tena teneva saṅkhaṃ gacchati. (MN 38)
Bhikkhus, whatever condition cognition arises upon, it is called after that... just as whatever condition fire burns, it is named after that.

Magic trick

Pheṇapiṇḍūpamaṃ rūpaṃ vedanā bubbuḷupamā
Marīcikupamā saññā saṃkhārā kadalūpamā,
Māyūpamañca viññāṇaṃ dīpitā diccabandhunā. (SN 22.95)
The kinsman of the Sun has taught that:
form is like a ball of foam, sensation is like a bubble,
perception is like a mirage, intention is like a plantain,
cognition is like an illusion,