whispered lineage

Short article for Overland Journal (published November 24, 2016):

https://overland.org.au/2016/11/zizek-during-trump-rhetoric-and-philosophical-impotence/

(The published version of this article contained editorial obfuscations. The original text is given here.)

It has been instructive to observe the different kinds of desperation with which different kinds of commentator on the political spectrum have weighed in on the aftermath of the U.S. presidential election. I want to hone in on only one here: the unsurprising but egregiously misguided grappling tactics with which Slavoj Žižek, as perhaps the major public representative of a European philosophical mainstream (that is also a loudly-advertised subversion of it), has tried to maintain some grip on philosophical credibility in the face of unprecedented threats to the very intellectual constituency that allows a Žižek to flourish at all.

His stance has been signaled at various points before, during, and after the election, at significant nodes of the big-player network. WikiLeaks, above all, was quick to post on Facebook, on November 4^th, a Channel 4 News video of the day before of Žižek endorsing Trump as his candidate of choice. Published on November 15th, a RT (Russia Today) post-election interview with Žižek has him repeating, somewhat chastened in the rainy streets of a post-election Manhattan, the same mantra: that Trump is unconscionable but preferable to a Clinton Presidency.

What do Žižek’s claims amount to, now that possibility is fact? What might before the election have passed, ironically, for an aspirational rhetoric, a hope for a radical displacement of what Žižek calls “status quo” Democratic exceptionalism and the kind of impunity Clinton Inc. appeared to sustain almost to the end (despite, above all, WikiLeaks’ efforts to derail it), now promises something perhaps more radical than even Žižek had in mind. The gist of his pre-election “desperate, very desperate” hope in preferring a Trump presidency was that it would necessarily entail a total recalibration of U.S. bipartisan political consensus, in which both parties would “have to return to basics, rethink themselves” in a “kind of big awakening” in which “new political processes will be set in motion.” He acknowledges the danger of especially the legal implications of Trump’s proposed rejigging of the U.S. Supreme Court, among other policy bugbears of his election campaign. Clinton, on the other hand, stood for an “absolute inertia … the most dangerous one … pretending to be socially progressive.”

Žižek pivots these more or less anodyne characterisations against the other, and surely he is correct that the “establishment elite” will require an intense period of self-scrutiny, that Democrats and Republicans alike will be reeling in a worse electoral shock than any so far this century, that the political process as Western liberal democracy has known it has suffered the worst disabusing of its putative moral authority since, quite possibly, January 1933. Nevertheless, Žižek is willing to allow that this is preferable to a Janus-faced liar and agent of corruption, what Assange called in his November 5^th interview with John Pilger the “centralizing cog” in “a whole network … of relationships … with particular states.” For Assange, these include(d) “the big banks, like Goldman Sachs and major elements of Wall Street, and intelligence, and people in the State Department, and the Saudis, and so on.” No great surprises here, and WikiLeaks was untiring in demonstrating evidence of the same claims. They also fit neatly with Žižek’s catalogue of “status quo consensus” that he wants to see Trump dismantle, come hell or highwater.

Even where Assange has the grounds to be right, and Žižek can be justified in taking that cue to mobilise it in a critique of hegemonic Clintonian hypocrisy (what he and Assange condemns as her self-interested willingness to recruit both Saudi oil-money and LGBT rights to her democratic cause), it is also the case that Žižek mis-plays the ideological advantage his case might make for him, and many of the rest of us ‘ordinary people’ who are concerned to consolidate his and Assange’s critique of the exhaustion and bankruptcy of Democratic self-representation—the thing that, for most, is what cost Clinton her coveted post.

The self-description ‘ordinary people’ is intended because it is in its notoriously vague and even untenable reference that Žižek makes one of his apparently inoffensive mistakes. The first was to assume that in some equally vague capacity Trump and his not-at-all-ordinary billionaire’s club is in any sense not an integral, if antagonistic, part of the Clinton-friendly network of the “Wall Street status quo.” His second is to imagine that the ‘ordinary people’ who gave Trump their vote—as would have Žižek himself—are either ordinary, or qua ordinary, wanted to elect an authentically ordinary candidate (any ideas?) to the White House. Because Žižek also claims that like those who wanted to see Sanders win, they are “anti-establishment people.” Neither Žižek, Trump’s voters, nor Trump are in any sense ordinary, whatever that might actually as opposed to expediently mean.

Žižek, the ‘ordinary people,’ and Trump himself, have proved, rather, hyperbolic in the truest sense, and as equally prone to flagrant over-statement, inaccuracy, blind-sightedness and cant of the most intellectually irresponsible kind. No-one needs to reiterate the extraordinary embarrassment that was Trump’s effort to engage in anything like intelligent and coherent discourse with the Democratic nominee and his own domestic critics. All too many of the ordinary Trump-folk of America were seen in multiple media to betray a basic ignorance of or indifference to the sheer seriousness of the moment of the world, well beyond domestic U.S. conditions, that in itself should have long-before disqualified Trump from his candidacy. Mike Pence denies the scientific evidence for evolution and climate change, a fact which will make it all too easy for Trump to sideline himself in opting out of U.S. commitments to the Paris Accord. We won’t begin to speak of likely Republican healthcare, gun-ownership, civil rights and foreign policy, because it is already far too depressing to contemplate.

Nor has there been any surprise in the spike of race-related hate-crime in the streets of America, and throughout the Web since November 10^th, a fact that Trump’s incoming chief strategist and Senior Counsellor Steve Bannon will doubtless relish even if Trump himself is careful to be seen not to. These people, and the media agglomerations that support their frequently litigious claims, are not “alt-right” whatever that aseptic and transparently white-washing euphemism is actually meant to signify (pun intended). They are agents of white, male, monied privilege and supremacy, pure and simple. They are agents of hate-speech, hate-acts and self-serving mendacity that, especially but not only in their most frankly neo-Nazi guise, would in most Western putative democracies be unable to reach the back pages of the shoddiest tabloid rag let alone the hallowed corridors of power of the most powerful democracy in the world. We have entered a moment of a fantastic travesty and reversal of decades (a post-war seventy years) of global evolution out from the shadow of precisely the conditions that sullied so much of that century, and threaten to irremediably ruin this one.

And Žižek wants to call its praises, however qualified they may be? How could a major intellectual get it so wrong, even and especially when he sounds almost right? On November 15^th he suggested that “the traditional machine of [for] manufacturing consent no longer works.” He may well be right in this, for better or worse, unless he is referring to the same machine that, with some minor adjustments, will now seamlessly be able to manufacture a new shape of consent for a far more dangerous driver than Clinton Inc. might have been.

But can Žižek really intend this as the preferable state of affairs? Trump’s embarrassments and indiscretions “even helped him because ordinary people didn’t identify with an ideal Trump. They perceived him as one of us precisely through his vulgarity, mistakes and so on. That’s how political identification works.” Again, the profundity is mind-boggling. Žižek even chuckles at his own suggestion that “ten years from now, and it’s not a joke, rape will be called ‘enhanced seduction technique.’” It’s good to know that he’s not joking, in case we thought he might have been taking rhetorical liberties: Žižek means to say that he means what he says.

And what does this actually mean? Nothing much less than now that the pernicious rhetoric of a Trump was able to hold sway over the most important democratic contest of our time, the rest of us now have permission not to really mean what we say, unless we couch it inside the invisible but ubiquitously ironic scare-quotes that are fully intended to scare precisely the people that are not explicitly identified, but only indirectly assumed in any given rhetorical statement. And Žižek’s mandate for this, in Trump, is carte blanche: “precisely the shock of electing him will maybe trigger some restructuring of the entire political space where new options will maybe emerge.” Another profound insight (mind those invisible scare-quotes!) and, again, he’s not kidding. “An authentic leftist movement around Bernie Sanders”? That is almost like assuming the third-placer Communist Ernst Thälmann had an authentic political future in Germany after April, 1932. Or would that be to commit the indiscretion of ironically exaggerating my claims in the sense Žižek emboldens us to? And what would be wrong with that, if so?

Donald Trump as a political player is, for Žižek, a “basic ethical catastrophe.” We suppose Žižek means this in a way he doesn’t mean the other things he says he means. Many would agree with him. And Žižek helps them, and us, wipe their hands of any incentive to assume that that is as bad a thing as it really is. He says we “should not focus on Trump as a person.” Perhaps we should focus on “the new face of power” as a cipher, who legitimately represents any number of variables as possible, instead. Perhaps the philosophical margin-caller has always been as naïve, and as futile. Let us hope that Žižek has reason to hope, as he claims he does, even when that means betraying his own, and our, reason. As he says, “Again, the situation is open.” For how long will it remain so?

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Some months ago, Overland published an essay in which (as a scholar of Buddhist non-violent resistance) I detailed the now 120 self-immolations of Tibetan monks, nuns and lay-people, a number not including the case of an Englishman, a young man whom I knew and who was also an ordained monk in the same Tibetan Buddhist tradition as the majority of his Tibetan cohorts. He’d carried a Tibetan flag, in solidarity with the others, and burned to death on the same day in November 2012 as the transition to Chinese leadership of Xi Jinping. To this day his act, as a political statement, is denied and ignored by his own monastic establishment and organisation, and hence by the world at large.

I have also since found it near to impossible to garner interest in a longer, more detailed version of the Overland article, that itself engendered not a bare comment, from anyone, anywhere, and only a handful of tweets, ‘likes’ and shares – if these last are presumably meaningful indices for social utility or relevance. A man had self-immolated in principled conscience and solidarity with far too many others, and few cared to pay any attention. His friends and loved ones, at least in public forums, understood his act as a tragic loss. His suicide was recently privately commemorated, and has been laid to rest. End of story.

But the ephemerality of his demise, of my own honouring of it in the pages of Overland, and indeed of the 120 Tibetans whose plea for freedom has similarly slipped into marginalisation, made me think a little more about the nature of such sacrifice and what it means for the social polity. Because conditions now, in Australia, beg similar questions, in perhaps less stark, yet strangely more compromised ways because of our distance from extremity.

We like to think, in liberal society, that a fundamental concern for the other, especially the more vulnerable, lies at the very heart of the democratic welfare state. Our social policies, research programs and civil bodies are often designed to attend especially to the needs of the weak and needy, those who are unable, for a multitude of reasons, to manage their own successful negotiation of the economic, professional, and interpersonal imperatives of life in late-industrial capitalist society. Those who can’t quite play that game, as it is required to be played in order to meet the standards of life, both subjective and objective, that the social system will consensually judge as being a worthwhile one.

In other words, we care insofar as it comes inbuilt into our implicit agreement to the rules of this particular socio-economic game, along with all its other more or less explicit instrumental rules (paying taxes, fines, fees; entrusting personal data to the discretion of the state; accepting the terms of democratic governance, etc.). Within this consensual game, those who play well and fairly, as well as those who don’t, claim a conscious recognition of the values of universal human dignity, of equality of opportunity, of responsibility to her neighbour. We will assume every life as having an equally inviolable value and significance, worthy of respect, its sovereignty enshrined in a secular law of universal humanity that goes beyond mere legalism.

Yet these values are also the ones that leave us ambivalent about issues such as voluntary euthanasia, suicide (principled or otherwise) or, less often, abortion. How is it, we think, that life, of such intrinsic value, can be taken away, by ourselves, with impunity? Most of the editors and scholars who turned down my longer study of the Tibetan self-immolations (and their sole Western counterpart), presumably did so on the basis of some obscure but powerful sense that I was endorsing political suicide, or could be interpreted as doing the same.

Yet it was not a question of indulging some personal opinion of mine; it was a matter of the advertisement of fact. Still, the editors didn’t want to risk any taint of culpability; they thought that to uphold liberal freedom means to uphold the normative claim of the inviolability of life, that life must not be threatened, diminished or disvalued in any way. Of course, they are right.

Yet their moral concern, which also seemed like a moral diffidence, a feebleness, given the gravity of the sacrifices by the Tibetan and English monks, appeared to say a lot more about their own preservation of a certain sense of self than about a genuine concern for the recognition of Tibetan human rights. A curious paradox: we will express our true moral concern for Tibetan sovereignty by quietly downplaying the ultimate, radical sacrifices they, and now a Westerner, have made on its behalf: that’s how much concern we hold – enough to appear to not hold any concern at all.

No-one enjoys the thought of suicide, even that of a total stranger. At the same time no-one lives someone else’s life for them. Every day each of us passes in the street a few hundred or more lives that go on without us having the barest minimum of direct or meaningful influence, agency or onus over them. Each other’s life is their own affair, just as mine is to me.

What gives me cause to hold any moral guardianship over another’s life? On what basis can I possibly pretend to step in and claim some authority over the inviolable integrity or decisions of that life? It has never been, and never will be, my own life, no matter how close to or enmeshed in it I may become, no matter how deeply and richly I may have come to value and love the person whose life they embody.

We like to imagine we hold moral concern for the destinies of others’ lives, but this is not true. It is, more truthfully, an illusion of the liberal-democratic ego, perpetuated by post-Enlightenment liberal rationalism, codified in law and global institutions of the super-ego such as the UN. More accurately, more closer to reality, we could say we are essentially indifferent to the lives of others: indifference not as a value-judgement, but as a phenomenological truth. We have an ethical concern but not an existential concern. No readers responded to my essay, and no editors would touch its more developed thesis, just because they didn’t have that kind of concern, simply because they weren’t that interested in 120 Tibetan people and a single Westerner, burning themselves to death. They thought they did, and at the level of thought they do, but in fact they don’t. There is a deep fissure between the two, of which we are largely unconscious.

Great amounts of government funding go into heritage conservation, with a thousand young students beginning degrees in art or cultural curation every year. Nonetheless, in the last few weeks Chinese authorities in Lhasa have been able to raze to the ground the oldest and most important of Tibetan Buddhist temples and religious pilgrimage sites, to make way for a massive underground carpark and above-ground shopping-malls and hotels catering to the millions of Han Chinese tourists rushing to the new themed tourist ‘Shangri-La’ into which they have turned old Lhasa. It is like pulling down St Peters to put up a few Pizza Huts.

Despite an international campaign submitted to UNESCO during recent weeks, nothing has been able to stop those bulldozers from permanently destroying the living symbols of an old, high culture –thousands of irreplaceable years old. You see, we care, in the ego’s mind, in the safety of liberal self-consciousness – just, not really, not in fact.

There is a very similar dynamic with regard to asylum seekers arriving in boats on Australian shores from Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and everywhere else where, we know, consciously, that intolerable conditions pertain. So, consciously, we know we should care, and indeed, at one level, we do. At the same time, the existential truth is that, just as we don’t care whether the person in front of me on the bus will suicide tomorrow, we also don’t care whether that person who chooses to get on the boat in Indonesia, lives or dies. It is their affair, not ours.

Some might even suggest it would be unhealthy to walk around feeling true care for someone we have never seen and will never know, so very far away.

Of course, we do care, when we think about it. But not in truth, not in fact. Which is why the Rudd ‘solution’ – to put these interlopers on some obscurely not-too-distant but not-too-close patch of ground, a bit like sweeping dirt under the rug, out of sight, but not quite out of mind, is the perfect and most honest real metaphor for how we actually feel, in this particular game of liberal democratic enlightened capitalist compassionate self-interest. Obviously, we care. It’s just that – we don’t really. And maybe it’s time we came a bit clean about that.

Published Overland Literary Journal August 7, 2013: http://overland.org.au/2013/08/on-self-immolation-asylum-seekers-and-the-manufacture-of-concern/

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Does Buddhism really deny life, with all its vast plenitudes and richness of invention, in the way it is often presumed to? Or is the idea – and the reality – of abundance central to its vision of life? The literature of canonical Buddhism is replete with the imagery, tales and promises of life in the round, the full and the rich. But it also comes with a few qualifying caveats.

The Buddhist universe is often described in plethoras of many-worlded glory: the different pure realms to which virtuous Buddhist practitioners are bound as the natural result of this-worldly devotion are remarkable for their richly-described abundance of happiness, wealth and long-lived prosperity. There are Buddhas and their retinue in each, and if for example the Buddha of devotion is Amitabha ‘of infinite light’ (as it is for much of East Asia and its Western diaspora communities) the bliss of such devotion is promised to be eternal and unbounded.

Still more, Buddhist enlightenment is not limited to some future life outside this one, but is the very condition of this life and world itself, that we are only blind to: this world now is already the paradise, if we could only see it, taste and treasure it. And herein lies the caveat: such blindness, at its very worst, engenders the various painful ‘hell-realms,’ both hot and cold and many-pronged, as the obverse of the reward for virtuous practice. And they are as abundant in their pain and suffering, as their counterparts are in wealth, health and freedom from suffering.

The good news is that the pain and suffering aren’t intractable, and can be permanently sundered. The particularly Buddhist news is that having started on the path, one’s ideas about abundance – what it is, why we value it, why we seek it – may change, and may change radically, so that it is not some objective notion of abundance that proves the case, but a relative, subjective one. In one of the central canonical texts of the Mahāyāna tradition, the 2nd-century C.E. Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra, abundance is literally figured into the mise-en-scene and the ensuing narrative. Vimalakirti (‘Stainless Reputation’) is a lay Buddhist master, who while feigning an illness invites vast numbers of enlightened and divine beings, monk and nun faithful, so-called ordinary folk and even innumerable animals and sentient creatures into his tiny room which miraculuously is able to hold them all, and expounds to them the teaching of the prajnaparamita (perfection of wisdom) philosophy.

What is almost unique in this popular text (and subsequently highly important for the pragmatically-minded spirituality of China and East Asia), is that this Buddhist adept is an ordinary if wealthy man, yet also an enlightenend being who seeks to inspire all sentient beings to the knowledge and practice of the way (dharma) of the Buddha. With his infinitely diverse audience at his bedside, Vimalakirti teaches that all freedom, all abundance of object and thought, feeling and hope, is born and dies in the mind that understands the suffering nature, impermanence, and essencelessness of the phenomenal world (the Three Marks of Existence). That when we understand the way all things actually exist, rather than how we would wish them to, then the riches of all the ten directions and the three times, as vast as space, become ours; and anything else pales in comparison.

This is an inspiring, also perhaps a grandiose vision, that might seem remote from our more quotidian concerns. But what else does Buddhism really point to in these visions of both splendor and pathos? Are their hells and heavens really real, whatever that might mean, and what do they mean for us here, in this world we already know?

The Desire realm
We could probably start understanding what they mean by considering some basic existential facts. Buddhism characterizes life as we know it in this human realm as being dominated by desire: for all kinds of things, whether they be Tim Tams or new cars, fame or political power. Different people desire different kinds of things, as well as some in common. We all crave pleasure, security and freedom from discomfort, but we tend to have different ways of achieving them. Some of us derive comfort from the vantage of a couch, a TV, chocolate or ice-cream stores, and a steady diet of DVDs; others from minimizing their needs and living with very little – as monastics do in most of the world religions, deprived of most of the comforts the rest of us take for granted.

This is strange – shouldn’t we all derive the same sense of abundance from the same things? But clearly we don’t, and differ quite markedly in our preferences, and our literal psychological experience of them. What does this tell us? Perhaps, that what defines the value of things is not their apparent inherent nature, but how we perceive them by virtue of our own minds. Their value then is not purely a function of the external world (despite some consensus on ‘things of value’), but more concretely of how we constitute them psychologically.

And when we consider the quantity of abundance, the disjunction between differing needs is even wider. Some of us need only one or two Tim Tams to be satisfied, others need (or think they do!) the whole packet. What is the balance here, the natural scale or the objective marker? Clearly, in an existential if not a scientific sense—nutritionists can tell you how many calories you should ideally consume, but not precisely why you should safeguard your own health—there is none. It really is up to us. Which is where freedom and self-empowerment comes in. But more of that in a moment.

If the world, as it is for Buddhism, is characterized by desire, it is also characterized by what are called the Three Marks of Existence, mentioned earlier: dukkha (suffering, or unsatisfactoriness), anicca (impermance) and anattā (selflessness). As beings driven by desire (animals on the other hand are dominated by fear) we humans relate with these three marks, or facts, from our default-position of need or desire of various kinds. We 1) suffer because we have too little, or too much, of what we (think we) need, and also because 2) whatever we get hold of to satisfy our desire is only temporary and must be continually renewed to keep satisfaction constant over time, but still worse 3) can never be completely achieved because what , or more precisely who, we think we’re satisfying doesn’t actually exist in the way we assume it does. In other words, this me who desires, who needs, who continually must be satisfied, is only partly real, and partly an illusion. And desire feeds on that illusion, as a junkie does on his drug of choice. For Buddhism, where that illusion of ‘me’ is very strong and very fixed in the mind, it is certain that uncontrolled desire reigns supreme. And this is where abundance, critically, comes in.

Too little in too much?
In consumer-capitalist culture, we have mistaken abundance for the mere quantity of whatever temporarily satisfies us. But have we adequately questioned whether the causal link between quantity (material abundance) and satisfaction, works the way it is supposed to? If I have unlimited chocolate and DVDs to feast on over the weekend, I ought to experience that abundance as equally unlimited. But do I? In reality, I will feel over-indulged and even exhausted and ill. If I need more to crave my satisfaction, is there a point where it will be reached? It may, but as Buddhism sees it, it is also likely that encouraging more consumption only leads to a more fixed habit of need, which simply reinforces on a psychological and even physiological level the craving for a certain minimum-level threshold of satisfaction.

Of course there is genuine and important pleasure in good food, fine wines and erotic stimulation at the right time, in the right place and context of our lives, and hopefully for most of us, such ‘Epicurean delight’ stays fairly fine-tuned—even if finally the best-lived sensory life might not bring the ultimate happiness some of us, and certainly Buddhists, may seek. While for others it can tip the balance into serious addiction and its extremes in eating-disorders, self-harm and even life-threatening pathology.

What is critical here for Buddhism is how this balance is a function of the mind, rather than the object of craving itself. The problem doesn’t even lie in the drug itself (though of course some are dangerously addictive), but in the mind that engages with it. A mind, or psyche, that is dominated by the deep delusion that pleasure and the happiness that results from it lies in things themselves, will be more vulnerable to the abuse of things, whether it be chocolate, sex, heroin, or power. A mind that becomes more and more aware that satisfaction lies in the mind itself rather than in the object it craves, becomes more and more attuned to its own homeostasis and the happiness and well-being that result from it.

The mind understands that a few Tim Tams and just one or two DVDs, or even none at all, is intrinsically happier and more abundant in that happiness, than the mind that has a surfeit of both but never achieves satisfaction from them (or most likely anything else either). And this is because the problem of satisfaction is not one of having enough pleasureable things to enjoy, of their sheer abundance, but of how we enjoy, appreciate, and value them. Of course, the body is naturally satisfied by good wine, food, and sexual stimulation, but there is clearly a physical and mental limit to those joys also. Too much of them, and the body and mind feel worn and wasted, tired and burdened with their ‘abundance,’ even depressed: the petite triste of too much stimulation, release, and indeed, satisfaction. It seems we may well suffer in getting too much of a good thing—Mae West and her perennial wisdom notwithstanding!

The mind that enjoys and the thing enjoyed
The crux here, and this is the largest part of Buddhism, is about the kind of mind that knows this, and can distinguish between the illusory abundance (quantity) of having endless satisfaction through things, and that of knowing that actual fulfillment is a quality of the mind that experiences them. In this case abundance would be a capacity of the mind, a way of enjoying what we have, however modest it may be. In fact the Buddha recommends having comparatively little for precisely the reason that you don’t need more of something to appreciate its quality as such. But which of these is the focus for our society, or political and economic system?

No Super-Savers Mars Bars for guessing (not yet, anyway!). Why should we be surprised that the majority of internet content is pornography? And that much of the developed world is increasingly characterized by the diseases, both mental and physical, of over-consumption, addiction and surplus production? For Buddhism, these are all symptomatic of how our minds are, how we experience what we already have, not of what we actually need in real terms to be happy and appreciate our so-called, and perhaps misguided, ‘abundance.’ And on an environmental and political level, can the whole world really aspire to match the levels of purely material abundance of the USA, Australia or Western Europe, and is it even desirable it should?

This is where we can return to the freedom and self-empowerment I briefly mentioned earlier. If the Buddhist way of life is above all concerned about understanding why and how we experience the pain and suffering we do, rather than what we think we need to avoid them, then it will naturally try to get to the bottom of how that mind works. This is why Buddhist meditation, and the practice of retreat from our habitual modes of consumption, is so important. It wants to understand and try to map out why we are caught up (it seems for a whole lifetime!) in these modes, and whether they really serve our happiness and well-being or not. It wants to get to the root of this mind that is dominated by desire, that craves objects of satisfaction, that even where it gains these, still somehow remains unfulfilled. And it does that through the simple practice of self-observation.

Another caveat: I just said ‘simple,’ but maybe it’s not so simple. After all, if I’ve spent a decade or more smoking, and drinking a little more than I need to, or generally being led by my appetites rather than leading them, it might not be so easy to just stop or reverse them. The tide of habit built over long time becomes who we are, and how we are, in a literal sense. We need to start with the pause- rather than the stop-button. And the process of self-knowledge, in this sense, last a whole lifetime. The important thing is that we should give ourselves the opportunity to truly understand this ‘six-fathom length of body and mind’ in which, as the Buddha proclaimed, we may discover the joy of profound enlightenment—and, naturally, everything that keeps us from that knowledge.

That we even have this opportunity is a cause for gratitude, and the value of being born in this human form is so great and rare that even to have reached this literal point we are all in here and now is already proof of the abundance that awaits us on the Buddhist path. And this introduces the idea not merely of material and psychological abundance, but the ethical and affective abundance of the bodhisattva—that being who devotes all her own abundance to the moral and emotional well-being of everyone else.

The abundance of the Bodhisattva
Earlier I mentioned the Mahāyāna sutra in which the wealthy layman Vimalakirti teaches the buddhadharma (the Way of the Buddha) to innumerable beings, all gathered in his ‘ten-foot square room.’ The critical thing about this particular layman, however, is that he is also a bodhisattva, or a Buddhist practitioner who has achieved great existential realizations of truth, and has combined these with genuine compassion and concern for the suffering of others. And it is a metaphor for the superabundant nature of the bodhisattva’s wisdom and compassion, that Vimalakirti is able to hold these infinite numbers of beings within his own domain, and bring them, as a bodhisattva is pledged to do, to the realization of enlightenment themselves.

The abundance that is pointed to here, however, obviously has little to do with showering others with gifts and shopping-vouchers and Bonanza-style handouts. It’s not even about making donations to charities so that ‘starving children’ in the ‘Third World’ might have enough dried rations to get through the summer. (There is nothing wrong with such charity in itself, except that it needs to be seen in the larger global context of greed and dependency that keeps the dynamics of inequity in place). The charity of the bodhisattva goes deeper than that. And that is because she is concerned not merely to keep people materially satisfied, but to introduce them to the nature of the cycle of need, acquisition and temporary satisfaction that keeps them ultimately unfulfilled in the first place.

The bodhisattva wants to awaken people to their own minds and spirits before merely satisfying their bodies, so that they can empower themselves to their own awakening as well. Vimalakirti teaches his audience that true abundance lies in the confrontation with the finiteness of life, and the revaluation of values that implies: not so we rush out to merely ‘experience’ as much pleasure as we can in our span of years, as if the sheer biochemical soup of adrenalin-charged hedonism is actually all that human happiness amounts to.

Unlike that utilitarian ethic that dominates our own time, based on a naturalistic equation between wealth and happiness, the Buddhist ethic for human abundance is geared to recognizing all that we don’t, and can’t ever ultimately have, so that we truly value and savour what we do, and indisputably, can have. In Zen practice, a dedicated adept experiences the bliss of satori in seeing the cherry-trees blossom for the first time (even when he has seen them a hundred times), or savours the poignancy (the Japanese mono no aware) of the passing of physical beauty in an aging woman. (The Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi has made a virtual way of life from this realization.) For Buddhism, these are the highest abundance indeed. So that what makes abundance abundant in Buddhism is not how much of it you have, but how you have and relate to it—even and especially if it is very little by conventional standards. And this works two ways: the act of giving is a wealth that can’t be denied. It is all the greater when offered from a place of relative poverty: the psychological benefit is proportionately that much more.

That which is given might be very little, or merely seem so to some outsider’s view. I once spent a week in a very poor village in central Burma, and despite the scarcity of resources there was no doubt that the villagers there enjoyed a high degree of psychological, emotional and even, relatively, material abundance. Is it possible that it is our own post-industrial, economically-driven notion of abundance that has it wrong, and that the time has come for us to learn from those who, superficially, have ‘less’?

Buddhism leaves the question open for your own discovery. But in doing so, promises that no matter what you do, or don’t have, you have precisely what you need to live a truly abundant, and happy, life. Just as it is.

Published in WellBeing Abundance magazine, print issue, Australia, April 2013

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Technoscientism is the privileging of a worldly transitivity: an ecstatic rather than enstatic pursuit of the humanly possible. That is, the things of the world, and the instrumentality of the world, come to determine the prioritizations of behavior and will. Technological objects in their utility are presumed to, and do, perform the functions of ontical significance for which they are devised, but which in their increasing indispensability can and do become ontologically more significant. Technological objects as such and their manipulation are invested with the kind of epistemic authority that disguises a fetishism of the object as a signifier for which the signified is necessarily unconscious. If the unconscious relation with biotechnological prosthesis were made explicit (as it potentially becomes in the symptomatology of obsessive compulsion or repetition), then the objects themselves would become ambiguous and the appearance of the repressed begin to subvert their overt, rather than covert, purposes.

Which means the human-prosthetic status of technological objects ideally remains regulated by a larger authority or even power than the merely individual one: the political and economic state, the free market, and the scientific-academic-medical institution. The dependency relation with the internet is perhaps in a transition phase, and it is not surprising that it accordingly begins to be controlled and censored by the regulating mechanism of the corporation and state which requires its polymorphous potentiality to be constrained within the boundaries of the pre-circumscribed system. Technoscience is in this case the value-neutral means to nevertheless authorize and faciltate the control of that system as it seeks to delimit the proliferation of the virtual world-mind threatening its own hegemony.

Trivially, it is not negotiable that larger digital home TVs or CD players should replace old quaint analog versions; yet this kind of imperative has an unspoken demandedness that goes beyond mere functionality and begins to disclose otherwise unseen ontological demands. When it comes to much less trivial cases such as biogenetic manipulation the same dynamic is less opaque. Yet the ontological emphasis is in principle the same: it is not the case that the market-state could ever potentially ‘choose’ to sanction old analog technology some nostalgic dignity beside the new, just as citizens could not optionally choose between the disclosure of biodata or remaining biologically obscure in the interests of state security. The mythos of technoscientism, by which late-industrial capitalism reifies its vested imaginaries, would disabuse the possibility. Biodata as a form of national security validation or incrimination is only an extreme, so visible, case.

Instead, ‘the maintenance of the state’ as a biotechnological complex performs an ecstatic (or external ‘world-centric’) function in the objectified manifestation of a collectively projective yet unconscious value. By so doing it absolutises technoscientific advance as the primary, if not exclusive site for the generation of such value. This value is increasingly only understood by virtue of its non-contingent artefacts, so that lacking these, value-as-such remains not only dis-placed but dis-agentic. Technoscientism begins to perform an ultimate validation and authorization of the sense of value that otherwise is left individually undetermined, ostensibly merely ‘subjective’ and even dubitable as such.

Such fetishisation of technoscientific authority is perhaps nowhere as distinct as in the near-universal concession to brain science and neurophysiology as the fundamental site and arbiter for all properly human value. Only insofar as ‘my brain’ allows my cognitive process differing degrees of agency, do I have sanctioned value as a sentient being. Further, it is only such self-empowering brain-states themselves that allow for the generation of those cognitive and creative products that mark me as an organism embodying value, and thus of value. My value is my brain-states; thus I must embark on the project of maintaining, and better, enhancing to greater and greater degrees of self-determination, ‘my brain’ in its privileged ontical status.

But I do this not for the sake of value as such, or as  ‘the place’ or prime site of value, as ‘representing’ or embodying it, but for the sake of the brain in its singular instantiation of value before all other objects. The complex symbolic relations I negotiate in ‘consuming’ technical, logical or aesthetic data have value not principally in themselves, but in their disclosure of the more significant functions and superior capacities of my cognitive or neurophysiological process. I am my brain, in the ontology of technoscientism, before I am ‘represented’ by whatever cognitions and symbolic systems that brain proposes as its ostensible, but necessarily diminished, sacred cows. Science alone escapes such delusive projection by ascertaining reality most truly even where the Higgs Boson  – or so-called ‘God’ – particle is an inference that ontologically speaking has possibly no less negligible existence than the antediluvian God once did.

Similarly, my society is primarily its efficient and enhanced capacity for technoscientific (ie. collective-objectified) advancement. Value is the advancement; not something advancement fails or doesn’t fail to instantiate. Value, subsumed by technoscientific production, is not pre-constitutive for the plethora of phone applications, mobile devices, virtual or digital resources I am able to access; they are value in their capacity purely as ontic signifiers of a transcendental signified: that which must necessarily represent an ultimate biotechnical fulfillment itself also deferred into an indefinitely postponed utopian future.

Technoscientific innovations do not exist neutrally, as optional addenda to the already-constituted habitus of value. Increasingly they monopolise the shared imaginary of value so that lacking them my lived-world lacks, not merely incidental, but ontologically decisive value. Such lack begins to be legalistically invoked in the minor but consequent requirements that attend many social and economic forms of enfranchisement. House leases, banking transactions and loans, training applications, minor medical or legal processes and so on increasingly require that the subject of the state be regulated and ‘connected’ in its specifically technoscientific constitution. In this way the state is a biotechnological organism that can only adequately function with the acquiescence of its similarly plugged-in human validators.

Thus my subjecthood increasingly finds metaphysical alibi in its embeddedness in, and submission to, state-sanctioned technoscience. My religious, political or ethnic identification carries almost nothing of the ontological weight it may once have. What counts now is my participation in and submission to those objectified forms of communal identity technoscience validates with primary epistemic authority. To demur is to be off the ontological grid, which is to be negligibly sub-existent in all the terms that now qualify full existence and membership in the species.

August, 2012

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