Why Artificial Intelligences Will Never Be Like Us and Aliens Will Be Just Like Us.

"Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."

cosmicorigins.com

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the great memes of science fiction, and as our lives come to resemble scifi stories ever more, we can't help but speculate what an AI will be like. Hollywood aside, we seem to imagine that AIs will be more or less like us because we aim to make them like us. And as part of that, we will make them with affection for, or at least obedience to, us. Asimov's Laws of Robotics are the most well-known expression of this. And even if they end up turning against us, it will be for understandable reasons.

Extra-terrestrial aliens, on the other hand, will be incomprehensible. "It's life, Jim, but not as we know it." We're not even sure that we'll recognise alien life when we see it. Not even sure that we have a definition of life that will cover aliens. It goes without saying that aliens will behave in unpredictable ways and will almost certainly be hostile to humanity. We won't understand their minds or bodies, and we will survive only by accident (War of the Worlds, Alien) or through Promethean cunning (Footfall, Independence Day). Aliens will surprise us, baffle us, and confuse us (though hidden in this narrative is a projection of fears both rational and irrational).

In this essay, I will argue that we have this backwards: in fact, AI will always be incomprehensible to us, while aliens will be hauntingly familiar. This essay started off as a thought experiment I was conducting about aliens and a comment on a newspaper story on AI. Since then, it's become a bit more topical as a computer program known as a chatbot was trumpeted as having "passed the Turing Test for the first time". This turned out to be a rather inflated version of events. In reality, a chatbot largely failed to convince the majority of people that it was a person despite a minor cheat that lowered the bar. The chatbot was presented as a foreigner with poor English and was still mostly unconvincing.

But here's the thing. Why do we expect AI to be able to imitate a human being? What points of reference would a computer program ever have to enable it to do so?

Robots Will Never Be Like Us.

There are some fundamental errors in the way that AI people think about intelligence that will begin to put limits on their progress if they haven't already. The main one being that they don't see that human consciousness is embodied. Current AI models tacitly subscribe to a strong form of Cartesian mind/body dualism: they believe that they can create a mind without a body. 

There's now a good deal of research to show that our minds are not separable from our bodies. I've probably cited four names more than any other when considering these issues: George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Antonio Damasio, and Thomas Metzinger. What these thinkers collectively show is that our minds are very much tied to our bodies. Our abstract thoughts are voiced using metaphors drawn from how we physically interact with the world. Their way of understanding consciousness posits the modelling of our physical states as the basis for simple consciousness. How does a disembodied mind do that? We can only suppose that it cannot.

One may argue that a robot's body is like a human body. And that an embodied robot might be able to build a mind that is like ours through its robot body. But the robot is not using its brain primarily to sustain homeostasis, mainly because it does not rely on homeostasis for continued existence. But even other mammals don't have minds like ours. Because of shared evolutionary history, we might share some basic physiological responses to gross stimuli that are good adaptations for survival, but their thoughts are very different because their bodies and particularly their sensory apparatus, are different. 

An arboreal creature is just not going to structure their world the way a plains dweller or an aquatic animal does. Is there any reason to suppose that a dolphin constructs the same kind of world as we do? And if not, then what about a mind with no body at all? Maybe we could communicate with dolphins with difficulty and a great deal of imagination on our part. But with a machine? It will be "Shaka, when the walls fell." For the uninitiated, this is a reference to a classic of first-contact scifi story. The aliens in question communicate in metaphors drawn exclusively from their own mythology, making them incomprehensible to outsiders, except Picard and his crew, of course (there is a long, very nerdy article about this on The Atlantic Website). Compare Dan Everett's story of learning to communicate with the Pirahã people of Amazonia in his book Don't Sleep There Are Snakes.

Although Alan Turing was a mathematical genius, he was not a genius of psychology. And he made a fundamental error in his Turing Test, in my opinion. Our Theory of Mind is tuned to assume that other minds are like ours. If we can conceive any kind of mind independent of us, then we assume that it is like us. This has survival value, but it also means we invent anthropomorphic gods, for example. A machine mind is not going to be at all like us, but that doesn't stop us from unconsciously projecting human qualities onto it. Hypersensitive Agency Detection (as described by Justin L Barrett) is likely to mean that even if a machine does pass the Turing Test, then we will have overestimated the extent to which it is an agent.

The Turing Test is thus a flawed model for evaluating another mind because of limitations in our equipment for assessing other minds. The Turing Test assumes that all humans are good judges of intelligence, but we aren't. We are the beings who see faces everywhere and can get caught up in the lives of soap opera characters and treat rain clouds as intentional agents. We are the people who already suspect that GIGO computers have minds of their own because they break down in incomprehensible ways at inconvenient times, and that looks like agency to us! (Is there a good time for a computer to break?). The fact that any inanimate object can seem like an intentional agent to us disqualifies us as judges of the Turing Test.

AIs, even those with robot bodies, will sense themselves and the world in ways that will always be fundamentally different to us. We learn about cause and effect from the experience of bringing our limbs under conscious control, i.e. by grabbing and pushing objects. We learn about the physical parameters of our universe the same way. Will a robot really understand in the same way? Even if we set them up to learn heuristically through electronic senses and a computer simulation of a brain, they will learn about the world in a way that is entirely different to the way we learned about it. They will never experience the world as we do. AIs will always be alien to us.

All life on the planet is the product of 3.5 billion years of evolution. Good luck simulating that in a way that is not detectable as a simulation. At present, we can't even convincingly simulate a single-celled organism. Life is incredibly complex, as this 1:1 million scale model of a synapse (right) demonstrates.

Aliens Will Be Just Like Us.

Scifi stories like to make aliens as alien as possible, usually by making them irrational and unpredictable (though this is usually underlain by a more comprehensible premise - see below).

In fact, we live in a universe with limitations: 96 naturally occurring elements, with predictable chemistry; four fundamental forces; and so on. Yes, there might be weird quantum stuff going on, but in bodies made of septillions (10²³) of atoms, we'd never know about it without incredibly sophisticated technology. On the human scale, we live in a more or less Newtonian universe.

Life as we know it involves exploiting energy gradients and using chemical reactions to move stuff where it wouldn't go on its own. While the gaps in our knowledge still technically allow for vitalistic readings of nature, it does remove the limitations imposed on life by chemistry: elements have strictly limited behaviour, the basics of which can be studied and understood in a few years. It takes a few more years to understand all the ways that chemistry can be exploited, and we'll never exhaust all of the possibilities of combining atoms in novel ways. But the possibilities are comprehensible, and new combinations have predictable behaviour. Many new drugs are now modelled on computers as a first step.

So the materials and tools available to solve problems, and in fact most of the problems themselves, are the same everywhere in the universe. A spaceship is likely to be made of metals. Ceramics are another option, but they require even higher temperatures to produce and tend to be brittle. Ceramics sophisticated enough to do the job suggest a sophisticated metal-working culture in the background. Metal technology is so much easier to develop. Iron is one of the most versatile and abundant metals: other mid-periodic table metallic elements (aluminium, titanium, vanadium, chromium, cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc, etc) make a huge variety of chemical combinations, but for pure metal and useful alloys, iron is king. Iron alloys give the combination of chemical stability, strength-to-weight ratio, ductility, and melting point to make a spaceship. So our aliens are most likely going to come from a planet with abundant metals, probably iron, and their spaceship is going to make extensive use of metals. The metals aliens use will be completely pervious to our analytical techniques.

Now, in the early stages of working iron, one needs a fairly robust body: one has to work a bellows, wield tongs and hammer, and generally be pretty strong. That puts a lower limit on the kind of body that an alien will have, though the strength of gravity on the alien planet will vary this parameter. Very gracile or very small aliens probably wouldn't make it into space because they could not have got through the blacksmithing phase to more sophisticated metalworking techniques. A metalworking culture also means an ability to work together over long periods for quite abstract goals like the creation of alloys composed of metals extracted from ores buried in the ground. Thus, our aliens will be social animals by necessity. Simple herd animals lack the kind of initiative that it takes to develop tools, so they won't be as social as cows or horses. Too little social organisation and the complex tasks of mining and smelting enough metal would be impossible. So, no solitary predators in space either.

The big problem with any budding space program is getting off the ground. Gravity and the possibilities of converting energy put more practical limitations on the possibilities. Since chemical reactions are going to be the main source of energy and these are fixed, gravity will be the limiting factor. The mass of the payload has to be not too large to be too costly or just too heavy, and it must be large enough to fit a being in (a being at least the size of a blacksmith). If the gravity of an alien planet were much higher than ours, it would make getting into space impractical - advanced technology might theoretically overcome this, but with technology, one usually works through stages. No early stage means no later stages. If the gravity of a planet were much lower than ours, then the density would make large concentrations of metals unlikely. It would be easier to get into space, but without the materials available to make it possible and sustainable. Also, the planet would struggle to hold enough atmosphere to make it long-term livable (like Mars). So alien visitors are going to come from a planet similar to ours and will have solved similar engineering problems with similar materials.

Scifi writers and enthusiasts have imagined all kinds of other possibilities. Silicon creatures were a favourite for a while. Silicon (Si) sits immediately below carbon in the periodic table and has similar chemistry: it forms molecules with a similar fourfold symmetry. I've made the silicon analogue (SiH₄) of methane (CH₄) in a lab: it's highly unstable and burns quickly in the presence of oxygen or any other moderately strong oxidising agent (and such agents are pretty common). The potential for life using chemical reactions in a silicon substrate is many orders of magnitude less flexible than that based on carbon and would, of necessity, require the absolute elimination of oxygen and other oxidising agents from the chemical environment. Silicon tends to oxidise to silicon dioxide (SiO₂) and then become extremely inert. Breaking down silicon dioxide requires heating it to its melting point (2,300°C) in the presence of a powerful reducing agent, like pure carbon. In fact, silicon dioxide, or silica, is one of the most common substances on earth, partly because silicon and oxygen themselves are so common. The ratio of these two is related to the fusion processes that precede a supernova and again are dictated by physics. Where there is silicon, there will be oxygen in large amounts, and they will form sand, not bugs. CO₂ is also quite inert, but does undergo chemical reactions, which is lucky for us, as plants rely on this to create sugars and oxygen.

One of the other main memes is beings of "pure energy", which are, of course, beings of pure fantasy. Again, we have the Cartesian idea of disembodied consciousness at play. Just because we can imagine it, does not make it possible. But even if we accept that the term "pure energy" is meaningful, the problem is entropy. It is the large-scale chemical structures of living organisms that prevent the energy held in the system from dissipating out into the universe. The structures of living things, particularly cells, hold matter and energy together against the demands of the laws of thermodynamics. That's partly what makes life interesting. "Pure energy" is free to dissipate and thus could not form the structures that make life interesting.

When NASA scientists were trying to design experiments to detect life on Mars for the Viking mission, they invited James Lovelock to advise them. He realised that one didn't even need to leave home. All one needed to do was measure the composition of gases in a planet's atmosphere, which one could do with a telescope and a spectrometer. If life is going to be recognisable, then it will do what it does here on earth: shift the composition of gases away from the thermodynamic and chemical equilibrium. In our case, the levels of atmospheric oxygen require constant replenishment to stay so high. It's a dead giveaway! And the atmosphere of Mars is at thermal and chemical equilibrium. Nothing is perturbing it from below. Of course, NASA went to Mars anyway, and went back, hoping to find vestigial life or fossilised signs of life that had died out. But the atmosphere tells us everything we need to know.

So where are all the alien visitors? (This question is known as the Fermi Paradox after Enrico Fermi, who first asked it.) Recall that as far as we know, the limit of the speed of light invariably applies to macro objects like spacecraft - yes, theoretically, tachyons are possible, but you can't build a spacecraft out of them! Recently, some physicists have been exploring an idea that would allow us to warp space and travel faster than light, but it involves "exotic" matter that no one has ever seen and is unlikely to exist. Aliens are going to have to travel at sub-light speeds. And this would take subjective decades. And because of Relativity, time passes more slowly on a fast-moving object; centuries would pass on their home planet. Physics is a harsh mistress.

These are some of the limitations that have occurred to me. There are others. What these point to is a very limited set of circumstances in which an alien species could take to space and come to visit us. The more likely an alien is to get into space, the more like us they are likely to be. The universality of physics and the similarity of the problems that need solving would inevitably lead to parallelism in evolution, just as it has done on Earth.

Who is More Like Us?

Unlike scifi, the technology that allows us to meet aliens will be strictly limited by physics. There will be no magic action at a distance on the macro scale (though, yes, individual subatomic particles can subvert this); there will be no time travel, no faster-than-light travel; no materials impervious to analysis; no cloaking devices, no matter transporters, and no handheld disintegrators. Getting into space involves a set of problems that are common to any being on any planet that will support life, and there is a limited set of solutions to those problems. Any being that evolves to be capable of solving those problems will be somewhat familiar to us. Aliens will mostly be comprehensible and recognisable, and do things on more or less the same scale that we do. As boring as that sounds, or perhaps as frightening, depending on your view of humanity.

And AI will forever be a simulation that might seem like us superficially, but won't be anything like us fundamentally. When we imagine that machine intelligences will be like us, we are telling the Pinocchio story (and believing it). This tells us more about our own minds than it does about the minds of our creations. If only we would realise that we're looking in a mirror and not through a window. All these budding creators of disembodied consciousness ought to read Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelly. Of course, many other dystopic or even apocalyptic stories have been created around this theme; some of my favourite science fiction movies revolve around what goes wrong when machines become sentient. But Shelly set the standard before computers were even conceived of, even before Charles Babbage invented his Difference Engine. She grasped many of the essential problems involved in creating life and in dealing with otherness (she was arguably a lot more insightful than her ne'er-do-well husband).

Lurking in the background of the story of AI is always some version of Vitalism: the idea that matter is animated by some élan vital which exists apart from it; mind apart from body; spirit as opposed to matter. This is the dualism that haunts virtually everyone I know. And we seem to believe that if we manage to inject this vital spirit into a machine, the substrate will be inconsequential, that matter itself is of no consequence (which is why silicon might look viable despite its extremely limited chemistry, or a computer might seem a viable place for consciousness to exist). It is the spirit that makes all the difference. AI researchers are effectively saying that they can simulate the presence of spirit in matter with no reference to the body's role in our living being. And this is bunk. It's not simply a matter of animating dead matter, because matter is not dead in the way that Vitalists think it is, and nor is life consistent with spirit in the way they think it is.

The fact that such Vitalist myths and Cartesian Duality still haunt modern attempts at knowledge gathering (and AI is nothing if not modern), let alone modern religions, suggests the need for an ongoing critique. And it means there is still a role for philosophers in society despite what Stephen Hawking and some scientists say (see also Sean Carroll's essay "Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things about Philosophy"). If we can fall into such elementary fallacies at the high end of science, then scientists ought to be employing philosophers on their teams to dig out their unspoken assumptions and expose their fallacious thinking.

~~oOo~~

Spiritual III: Demesnes of Power

follows on from Spiritual II: Frames.

Caged or Fleeced?
from right-wing journal The Spectator, 
arguing for more individualism. 

So far we've looked only at what the word spiritual means and what frames it is associated with. In other words we've been focussed on the conceptual space delimited by attaching the adjective spiritual to various nouns and verbs. Now we need to think about who is using the adjective to make their nouns and verbs special. And how those people operate within the conceptual space. In other words we need to look at the politics of spiritual. As a first step this essay will outline a view of contemporary Western politics in which modern ideas of identity play an active role in shaping individuals into subjects. This leads into a consideration of the impact of Romanticism on the political landscape and Foucault's view of the subject as a construct whose purpose is subjugation.

Politically spiritual is tied up with notions of authority, and authority is an expression of power. The essay will argue that spirituality is concerned with channelling power in religious communities. In the Buddhist context we take on to surveil and police our own inner life as a service to the community, and as long as we are seen to be doing so, the community repays us in belonging.

Apologies, but this essay is long. I hope not too long that people won't read it, but I can't see how to split my treatment of spritual into any more parts. And in any case I want to move on to other subjects. So to begin with we need to look at the modern idea of selfhood and identity and to see how it is shaped by the discourses of power which have dominated the Western World for some centuries now.

The Modern Self.

"... history is read narcissistically to reconfirm one's present sense of identity and any potentially disruptive awareness of alterity is suppressed." - Lois McNay. Foucault: A Critical Introduction. (p89)

Individualism is one of the guiding lights of modern Western Society. Philosophically it seems to stem from 18th century Utilitarianism and the associated attitudes of Mercantilism. It is epitomised in the trade-fuelled Libertarian governments of the 18th and 19th centuries and more recently in the Neolibertarian governments (conservative and progressive) that have dominated the Western world since at least the 1970s. It's the mentality that, for example, enslaved Indian peasants to grow opium and then went to war with China to make certain of continued profits by ensuring that Chinese peasants consumed the dangerous drug. These days the East India Company has been replaced by the IMF and World Bank, but the bottom line is still profit.

Present-day individualism benefits the rich and powerful in two main ways. Firstly by telling everyone to pursue their own good (their own desires) it divides the population and prevents effective opposition to Neolibertarian aims of creating the perfect conditions for businessmen to become rich and powerful. Secondly it justifies the means used by businessmen to become more rich and more powerful (e.g. political economies based on mythological "market forces"; use of ultra-cheap labour abroad; evasion of taxes; etc.). Individualism gives the illusion of freedom. We are more free to choose our religion in the West than at perhaps any time in history. We have greater choice of breakfast cereals or TV channels too. But we are enslaved to an economic system that regards us as units of production, that characterises every human being as perfectly self-centred, manipulative and ruthless in pursuit of their own best interests. From the point of view of those in power, the religion of the masses and their breakfast cereal have the same value, or at least the same kind of value.

The more we exercise our individual choice, the more society fragments. And the more society fragments the less effective we are as a collective. We out-number the rich and powerful by at least 100 to 1. So we could stop them if we wanted to, just by acting in concert. We've seen a number of successful revolutions in the last few decades where the people simply gathered and demanded change in sufficient numbers that they could not be ignored. Former Soviet Eastern Europe went this way. But because we feel free we don't resist our slavery. "Spiritual but not religious" is one of the most exquisite examples of this pseudo-freedom. We have complete freedom of religious belief because it has no longer has any economic implications. We are encouraged to have our own individualised religion, partly because organised religion is what bound communities together for centuries (perhaps forever). If being spiritual was a real threat to profits, it would be illegal. Where collective action is perceived as a threat, as ironically it is in communist China, then religion is tightly controlled and rouge groups persecuted.

© Tom Toles

Meanwhile we work hard for minimum wage and 2 or 3 weeks of holiday a year, in a world of absolutely astounding productivity and unimaginable wealth. And yet we never have enough. This is a deeply rooted feature of Merchantilism: the poor only work hard enough to meet their needs, so the rich make it almost impossible for them to meet their needs, despite vast surpluses and enormous waste. Think, for example, of all the food going to waste! Estimates in the UK are that 30% of food produced is wasted. All that wasted food helps to keep food prices high, while those who grow it over-supply and cannot earn a living on the prices they get. House prices (in the UK at least) are kept artificially high to hoover up any extra wealth we might accrue. The point at which we might feel we have enough, and might thus stop working so hard, is kept out of our reach.

Merchantilism is predicated on everyone working as hard as they can all the time in the knowledge that worn out workers can easily be replaced. When you accept payment for work, you are expected to give everything you have in return, however low the wage. Of course the system is imperfect, but measurement techniques have become ever more intrusive in recent decades. In addition one of the main messages of the school system is conformity: "do as authority tells you". Schools are able to enact and enforce arbitrary rules such as dress codes and to exclude pupils from eduction is they refuse to conform. In Britain school children routinely wear ties (I still find this shocking). University education is gradually changing for the worst as well, becoming more and more oriented to the demands of Merchantilism.

In addition, government policy consistently encourages high unemployment levels (unemployment is an invention of the Merchantilist system) in order to keep wages down. And while real wages continue to fall, executive salaries rise exponentially. An executive may earn more in a single year than the average employee earns in a lifetime. Of course governments regularly promise full-employment, but they simply cannot afford anything like it. Without high unemployment wages would sky-rocket and severely impact profit. In addition we are constantly encouraged to want more, to buy more by the representatives of companies than make things we don't even need. Thus the goal is always moving, and the game is rigged so that we could never reach it if it was. And yet few of us consider quitting the game. Most of us are not equipped to function outside of society, even the outcasts depend on society.

Many of the gains won by a century of concerted action by labour unions have been eroded or completely lost. The adversarial relationship between labour and capital led to excesses where labour was able to seize power. The UK seems to be firmly on the road back to Dickensian relationship between capital and labour in which all power in the relationship is held by capitalists. Only this time the capitalists are vastly more wealthy than they were in Dickens's time. Wealth has certainly been destroyed by the repeated economic crises since 1973, but the 1% are wealthier than ever.

Most Western states have implemented some kind of "safety net" that were initially conceived of as offsetting the damaging social effects of Merchantilism. The impulse behind the welfare state grew out of humanitarian urges of the late Victorian period and a recognition of the hardship caused by industrialisation and the unemployment that was built into the economy to keep wages low. But in the UK it has grown into a vast control mechanism. The economy is structured so that whole sections of society must rely on welfare payments - which are called benefits. The benefit being the up side of an economy which can simply shut down the industries that provided employment for whole towns and industries, creating long-term, generational unemployment for which the poor are blamed. To take the state pound nowadays is to invite the state to surveil and scrutinise one's life to a degree that would make Catholic priests envious. The state can for example, examine one's bank accounts and engages in regular interrogation of recipients and draconian examinations of "fitness". Despite endemic unemployment the unemployed are seen as morally reprehensible. Taking money from the state is seen in moral terms as incurring a debt, especially by conservatives (the reasoning behind the "moral accounting" metaphor is explored by George Lakoff in Metaphor, Morality, and Politics).

For an alternate view on the modern self see Adam Curtis's documentary The Century of the Self. Curtis explores Freudianism in relation to the rise of democracy. Democracy is seen as releasing the primitive Id of the masses producing the horrors of WWI. The irrational masses required control via the manipulation of their unconscious via propaganda (rebranded as "public relations").

But it's not only the unemployed who are tempted with "benefits". Housing is now so expensive in the UK that a clear majority of new claimants of Housing Benefit (a welfare payment provided specifically for housing costs) are in work. Housing Benefit is a £17 billion annual subsidy to landlords to allow them continue to gouge unreasonable profits from the market and to restrict the supply of housing to keep prices high. At the same time British society promotes the ideal of home-ownership as the acme of individual identity. The agony the average British wage earner is going through is exquisite, and many of them are convinced it is because of bogus reasons such as immigration.

Meanwhile the media don't just sell us things we don't need. Apart tax payer funded broadcasting, all media is paid for by advertising, including most internet content. The media has a vested interest in shaping our behaviour towards consumerism, towards views which promote the goals of Merchantilism. The media began employing psychologists to make their presentations more effective back in the 1920s. (See the Adam Curtis documentary for an account of this). They use subtle techniques to "nudge" our behaviour in a direction that is good for business. For them it was a problem that social conventions were against women smoking for example. So Edward Bernays cooked up a publicity stunt which linked smoking to the suffragette movement and painted cigarettes as "torches of freedom". Great result. Women felt more free by becoming addicted to a harmful poison, and began to die in their millions from tobacco related illnesses. Again the illusion of freedom disguises the reality of bondage.

This is not a conspiracy theory. I don't think that dark cabals are meeting behind closed doors to arrange it. I think its a dynamic of civilisation, an emergent property of the kind of social system we have based on a huge number of factors. And for the most part it's happening in the open. Governments are open about their beliefs and about their methods. The media are less open, but investigations like Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent (a book and a film) have left us in no doubt about how they operate.

So individual identity in modern times is shaped to fit into this worldview, not simply Vitalist and Dualist, but Utilitarian, Merchantilist and (pseudo) Libertarian. Spirituality is no threat to this because it is focussed on the spirit and the immaterial  and leaves the body emeshed in the world and subject to market forces.


The Curse of Romanticism

If we look more closely at the referrants of "spiritual" we see a considerable overlap with the concerns of Romanticism. A concern with the immaterial over the material; with the unseen over the seen; with nature over culture; with experience over reason; with eternal life, even eternal childhood conceived of terms of in spontaneity and innocence, over death and the loss of naivete. The material world is less interesting than the afterlife; human beings less interesting than spirits (the higher and less material the better). According to French mystic, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.

The goal of the spiritual is escape from the material world where we inevitably die and, in the Indian worldview, die repeatedly. We escape (even if only in imagination) the material, relative, contingent world—i.e. saṃsāra—for an immaterial (outside space and time), absolute, eternal world—i.e. nirvāṇa. And when someone like Nāgārjuna tries to point out that the dichotomy is meaningless, we simply invent some new transcendental escape route: e.g. the dharmakāya.

By the beginning of the 20th century most Westerners were politically aware enough to have good reason to distrust authority figures, both spiritual and secular. The wealthy and powerful collude against the poor and oppressed to keep them divided, poor and oppressed. This was made easier by the rise of the middle-class, the administrators and facilitators of the rich and powerful, aspirational with respect to security and comfort and instilled with aristocratic contempt for working people. The popularity of Romanticism also worked to the advantage of business people. A few drug-addled, spoiled brats from the upper-classes who wrote sentimental poetry that made individualism seem desirable for the masses. The kind of freedom from responsibility or the need to work for a living, the kind of freedom that only comes with inherited wealth and privilege, became a thing for everyone to aspire to. Partly as a result of this, people have drowned their awareness in intoxicants and particularly the middle-classes have Romanticised this as a kind of freedom, though as before it leaves their bodies in bondage to profit. After a weekend "on the lash" as the Brits so eloquently call it, Monday morning means a return to bondage. Or after a lifetime of bondage we retire to freedom in old age. Except old age has been consistently redefined to make it less accessible.

At it's worst the hippy movement encouraged everyone, though in effect mainly the newly wealthy middle-class progeny of the post-war baby-boom, to disengage from politics and society. Like their Romantic heroes, the baby-boomers were sexually promiscuous, leading to a huge upsurge in sexually transmitted diseases. They were intoxicated, leading to drug and alcohol addiction with massive impact on families and society, and many new cases of psychosis and early death. And they were free of social conventions which boiled down to political disengagement, allowing conservatives to set the social and political agenda by exploiting the subsequent breakdown in the value of collectivity. Conservatives simply acted in concert and over-whelmed the divided progressives.

After decades of letting conservative business interests set the public agenda, we've got to the point where even the Left implement Neolibertarian economic policies. Sometimes the Left are even more assiduous in pursuing these policies, because they are trying to prove themselves on terms set by conservatives.

Romanticism might have started off as a necessary correction to the mechanistic views of scientists flushed with success as the beginning of the Victorian Era. But it has simply become another way in which we play into the hands of those who would economically enslave us. SBNR is the perfect religious view for a Neoliberal ideology. The political disengagement that typically goes along with individualistic spirituality is perfect for the powerful. Escapism relieves the frustration and tedium of modern work, leaving us resigned to wasting our best years for men who earn more in a year than we will in a lifetime. Contemporary spirituality is escapism. By focussing on the immaterial it denies the value of the material, and this plays into the hands of those who control the material world. We end up fighting Māra's battle for him.


Foucault

Michel Foucault argued that to be a subject is to be subjected - thus providing an important counter-weight to Romanticism. The self we identify with is, in fact, mostly shaped by external forces. Reflecting on my own life I see that my self-view has been shaped by many institutions: schools, church, medical clinics, hospitals, government departments, workplaces, unions, clubs, secret societies, professional associations, the news/entertainment media; by people playing their own social roles: family, in-laws, friends, peers, colleagues, romantic and sexual partners; by people playing various official roles such as doctor, psychiatrist, teacher, priest, politician, police, lawyer, accountant, psychologist, guru; by abstract institutions such as time, wealth, money, wages, taxes, property; by abstract issues such as gender politics, sexual politics, national and international politics, national identity, post-colonialism, multiculturalism; by the fact that I emigrated twelve years ago and had to retrain in many of these areas and add class awareness. The list goes on and on. My personal input into who I am is rather minimal. Virtually every I feel myself to be is inherited or imposed on me rather than emerging out of my being. Sure, my basic psychology is broadly speaking nature; but my identity is almost pure nurture.

Almost all of these institutions aim to subject, to subjugate, me through shaping my subjectivity so that I subjugate myself. That is, for me to see myself as naturally subject to the limits, controls and definitions of society. For me to unthinkingly obey prohibitions and taboos. The constant threat is that failure to conform redefines the transgressor as other. And for the other the rules are different, less optimal, less conducive to well being, often harsh. To be other is to be sanctioned and excluded. The veneer of civilisation on how we treat others is very thin indeed. One sees all this play out in simpler forms in primate societies. It's well worth reading Jane Goodall's book In the Shadow of Man, in order to get a sense of how human society is an extension of basic primate society. The fundamentals are all similar.

Our very subjectivity is a construct which we have built in concert with society from birth. Forget the metaphysics of self, we don't even understand the politics of self. And Buddhism also plays it part in creating an acceptable subjectivity. We use "precepts" as a way of reminding other Buddhists about what is acceptable behaviour: we surveil and police each other. We emphasise that a Buddhist must take on to be ethical, rather than allow ethics to be imposed on us (with explicit comparisons to other ethical systems). When we criticise each other, it is often not for the act itself, but for the failure of self-control, the failure to conform. We explicitly invite others to subject themselves to Buddhist values which we extol as the most sublime set of moral values ever enunciated. Who would not want to subject themselves to sublime taboos, especially when part of the narrative is that no evil thought goes unpunished? Buddhism channels the power inherent in social groups in a particular kind of way, with particular kinds of narratives. It is not exempt or outside this social dynamic, despite all the transcendental narratives, Buddhist humans and still just humans.

Buddhism uses carrots to make obedience seem attractive, and sticks to make disobedience seem frightful. Just like every other primate group. This is how primate groups ensure collective survival. But it is open to exploitation. Even amongst chimps, as the story of monstrous Frodo of Gombe Stream suggests. Frodo used his size and aggression to cow the Gombe stream group and to terrorise neighbouring groups. The usual social controls, often operating through the "person" of the alpha-female, failed with Frodo.

Along with conceptions of subjectivity which are aimed at controlling individuals, Foucault points out the role of institutions which institutionalise social forms of control. We are shaped, but imperfectly and so society creates conditions in which it can exert control over any stray desires and urges that pop up. Religion is a partly a formalisation of certain social controls, aimed at subjecting and controlling the tribe. This has clear survival value. For Buddhists this manifests as belief in karma and enforcing of precepts. Karma is, like God Almighty, a supernatural surveillance agency that knows whether you've been bad or good. Karma makes the Panopticon seem an amateurish fumble. Be good or go to hell, has always been religion's trump card.

Today we don't see ourselves as dependent on friends and neighbours. We see them as accessories, as optional. The average person has just enough individual wealth, and is so steeped in the rhetoric of individualism that they are convinced they can go it alone, or at least with their mate and children in tow. Communities are bound by mutual need. If we assume that we don't need anyone, then we are not part of the community. And divided we are conquered by the more powerful. These days they make our captivity pretty comfortable, and a lot of the time we can forget we live in bondage. We lap up the narratives of virtuality—virtual friends, virtual pets, virtual communities—without seeming to notice that they are virtually useless compared to the real thing.

Authorities and Adepts

Despite rampant individualism, we cannot override the fact that we are a social species. We arrange our society in a uniquely human way, but still retain some features in common with other primates. And I think this insight may point to a weakness in Foucault's attempts to problematise society. We can't really live without it. Which is why we accept virtuality as ersatz society.

Many of us accept authority figures (alpha-individuals) and feel more secure having one around. In effect we like someone to tell us how to be individualistic, like teenagers who dress alike to symbolise their rebellion against conformity. Some of us prefer to try to unseat authority figures whether in an attempt at wresting actual power from them (pretty rare) or in a kind of impotent passive rage against authority generally (pretty common). Some of us have an ideology which is against authority figures on principle, like eternal teenagers. There's a lot of pressure on us to be neotonous, to remain childish because, like children, people with childish ideologies are easy to manipulate. A surprising number of Buddhists seem to be against any authority figure and any form of collectivity.

Every domain has it's authorities and adepts. And the spiritual domain is no exception. Spiritual long referred to that which pertained to the church. 200 years ago adding the adjective spiritual to nouns and verbs was how the Church marked out its demesne. In that tradition becoming an authority in the church was relatively arduous. Priests were often the only educated people in their milieu. The great universities were founded to educate priests during the so-called Dark Ages. However with the modern decline of the power of the church to impose standards and the rise of religious alternatives (particularly the freelance gurus of India), the adjective spiritual has been co-opted by non-church groups. The demesne of spiritual and all it's power and resources is now hotly contested. Anyone can become a spiritual authority or a spiritual adept with no effort or qualification. The demesne is haunted by frauds and hoaxes, but this seems not to slow down the commerce in all things spiritual.

In Buddhism we have a great deal of anxiety over authenticity and authority. We see a lot of ink spilt over whether our scriptures are authentic while modern scholarship, including my own, is constantly casting doubts. If the texts are authentic, then just what authentically are they? Similarly Buddhists enunciate lineages at great length in the hope that this guarantees the authoritativeness of authorities. However, Sangharakshita has shown that lineage is no guarantee of anything: see Forty-Three Years Ago.

This is not a new priority, but visible at all stages of Buddhist literature. The question of who is a spiritual authority and who is a spiritual adept, and just what that entitles them to say and do are constantly under review. It's always difficult to tell. (See How To Spot an Arahant). And of course Western Buddhism has been more or less constantly dealing with the problem of authority figures who defy norms and break rules. It is notable that commentators seem to fall back on Judeo-Christian notions of justice when this happens. A crisis of behaviour almost always becomes a crisis of faith and the faith we grew up with very often shapes our opinions more than our convert beliefs. 

Even the individualist tends to have a "spiritual teacher" someone who is both spiritual themselves in some exemplary fashion and who who is an expert in spiritual practice and thus able to oversee the practice of others. This relationship may be personal or be at arm's length through books and videos. And we may hedge our bets by picking and choosing from spiritual teachers of various kinds. But we still look to someone to define what is spiritual: what we should believe, and what we should do about it. And this gives those who play the role of teacher considerable power. Indeed with direct disciples who abdicate personal authority and decision making to a guru, the problem is even more acute. It's interested that despite early flirtations with spiritual masters, we now tend to follow teachers instead. The obedience implicit in the disciple/master relationship doesn't sit well with individualism and has been famously disastrous on a number of occasions. Being a celibate teacher in a sexually promiscuous society seems to be an especially fraught situation.

I've already touched on the Foucaldian critique of the inner self as envisaged by the Enlightenment. My take on this is that the Enlightenment self, characterised especially by rationality, is a feature of Neolibertarianism via its Utilitarian roots. Utilitarianism is caught up in the Victorian over-emphasis on a particular kind of rationality. We see it in the "rational choice" models of economics, which let the developed world's economies fall into a major recession with (almost) no warning in 2008. I've been critical of this view of rationality in my writing e.g. Reasoning and Beliefs; or Facts and Feelings. Foucault's study of the fate of the irrational person in post-Enlightenment society traces the ascendency of this view. and particularly examines the power exercised over those who seem to be unreasonable or irrational. We can contrast this with the Romanticisation of spirit and the self in reaction to an overly mechanical view of the universe.

The political side of spiritual can be seen in this light: that it represents an exertion of power to control the individual, and that individual consents to be controlled. By obeying norms we find belonging. Belonging is essential to the well-being of human beings, and has always provided one of the strongest levers against the individual: conform or be excluded. In a hunter-gatherer society conformity conveys benefits that outweigh the costs, but in a settled society (with cities etc) the dynamic is far more complex.

In Libertarian ideology this is turned on it's head. In the Libertarian view no benefit can outweigh the cost of conformity. The Neolibertarian ideology is one adopted by the 1% of rich and powerful. It says that everyone is free to make a profit. The fine print however is pure Mercantilism: the person only has value to the extent that they contribute to profit making. Self-employment is fine, even admirable, but unemployment is immoral. In this ideology arguing for more taxation on profit is irrational since it interferes with profit making; in the jargon it's anti-business. The purest form of profit making is the effortless increase in wealth obtained from owning land that goes up in value due to external factors. Profit without effort. It's almost a religion in the UK and almost completely exempt from taxation (compared to wages and profits). To some extent the individualism of SBNR partakes of this ideology. Let no one interfere with my spirituality. Magazines are full of ads promising spiritual attainment with no effort. And there is a spiritual 1% living in relative luxury on the proceeds of this economy.

Attempts to break out of this thought control often take the form of what we in the Triratna Order call therapeutic blasphemy, where one deliberately breaks taboos, such as prohibitions against blasphemy, in order to loosen the grip of a lifetime of conditioning in Christian values. Sangharakshita used this example of positive blasphemy in his 1978 essay Buddhism and Blasphemy (Reprinted in The Priceless Jewel [pdf], 1978), written in response to conviction of the editor and publishers of the Gay News for "blasphemous libel" in 1977 (see BBC summary of the case). The use of antinomian and transgressive practices in Buddhist tantra dating from perhaps the 8th century onwards appears to have a similar purpose.

One might think that Buddhism at least would inform a better kind of government, that countries where Buddhism is the state religion would tend to exemplify Buddhist values. However, the opposite is more often true.


Buddhist Politics

Think for a moment about the forms of government associated with nominally Buddhist countries. Traditional Asian Kingdoms and Empires have been, like their Occidental counterparts, harshly repressive, imperialistic, racist and rigidly hierarchical. There is nothing particularly attractive about the forms of government that have developed in the Buddhist world.

Today the three main Theravāda countries, Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand, are all run by authoritarian, repressive governments. Either military governments as in Burma, or militaristic. Thailand declared martial law last month.

Mahāyāna countries have not produced more compassionate forms of government on the whole: China, North Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Tibet. Bhutan might be the only exception, but the peasants there really are brainwashed into seeing their royal family as deities to whom they owe fealty, obedience and obeisance. A form of political control once employed by the Tibetans as well. There's nothing particularly admirable about virtually enslaving the peasant population in order to support a huge number of unproductive men. A system that produced a major shortage of marriageable men, and yet such poverty than brothers often clubbed together to share one wife. Of course one cannot condone the Chinese invasion of Tibet on those grounds. The brutal repression of the Tibetans and the widespread destruction of their culture has been heartbreaking. But pre-invasion Tibet is Romanticised by Westerners (this is the theme of Don Lopez's Prisoners of Shangrila which is worth reading).

For those who hope to implement Buddhist control of Western countries the question is this: based on which historical precedent do you see religious government of our countries as a good thing? Churchill did say:

"Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

The governments of nominally Buddhist countries are amongst the most repressive in the world, no matter what period in history we look at. In fact Buddhism makes for poor politics precisely because it is traditionally disengaged. And the engaged part of engaged-Buddhism is coming from external sources. A Green government might be a good thing, but one that values the natural world would mostly likely be better than any form of Buddhist government. No one who denies the reality of people or suffering should have access to power over people.

Conclusion

We'll probably never get rid of spiritual in Buddhist circles, certainly not on my say so. Religious people use the religious jargon of the day, just as the authors of the early Buddhist texts used Brahmanical and Jain jargon. Some times the re-purposing of a word works out, sometimes not. Brāhmaṇa retained its Vedic meaning and caste associations despite attempts to assimilate it, while karman or dharman became naturalised and have now even been Anglicised. The argument over whether or not Buddhism is a religion, or a philosophy, or a spiritual tradition, or whatever, goes on.

And old habits die hard. Spiritual is a word we use partly as a lure, a familiar term for those who are dissatisfied with ordinary life. "Mundane life sucks? Try our all new/old spiritual life, guaranteed 25% more satisfying! We're so confident that you don't get your money back." Spiritual is a handle on what we do that outsiders can grasp and given the jargon laden claptrap some of us come out with, something familiar comes as a relief. It provides what Frank Zappa used to call Conceptual Continuity.

But all of this goes on in an economy of power. Spiritual discourses aim to shape a particular kind of subject for a particular kind of purpose. And the explicit purpose, spiritual liberation, may mislead us into thinking that by taking on the discourses of spirituality we are becoming more free. In fact very few people achieve liberation and most of us are in bondage. Unfortunately the politics of the day is easily able to exploit the myth of liberation to better enslave us. Power exploits our naive dualism and over-concern with the mental or immaterial, to enslave our bodies.

To some extent we suffer from "the world that has been pulled over our eyes to distract us from the truth." This line from The Matrix draws on Gnostic ideas about the world. In fact the rampant escapism of spirituality does make it easier to create compliant, obedient subjects who work hard to create obscene profits for the 1%. Like the middle-classes who facilitated Merchantilism, the cadre of disciples channel power within communities.

But it's not the end of the world. There are benefits to being religious and a member of a religious organisation. Buddhism's lessons on life are actually pretty helpful a lot of the time. The practices are worth pursuing in their own right. It's just that ideally we'd all think about our lives a bit more. And especially reflect on where our views come from.

~~oOo~~